Into Darkest Darkness
by The Elusive Author
Summary: Khan/OC - I'll die for you.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: **Hello, there! Here is a Star Trek Into Darkness story. John Harrison/Khan and OC. It's about the Eugenics War from the point of view of a female Augment.

Now, shall we begin?

* * *

**Chapter**** One: Awareness.**

**Wake up.  
**

**_She didn't know where she was. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and didn't even believe she was alive. The lids of her eyes refused to open and her skin couldn't feel, but somewhere inside told her that she was cold and unmoving and dead._**

**_Death, she mused to herself, isn't so difficult as they always made it out to be. Where was her sense of panic? The adrenalin wasn't coursing through her veins, her heart wasn't pounding, and there was no black wool encroaching on her vision. How could there be, after all? All her world was shrouded in black._**

**_And it was still cold inside._**

**_Was this her chance to muse on her life? People used to say that, she remembered. Where were the vivid flashes that would reveal her happiest moments or her greatest sins before she died? There was only blackness, and the cold that she began to feel seeping into her body so slowly. Her blood was frozen, she belatedly realised. The explanation didn't calm her, or frighten her. Her heart wasn't beating but her mind was moving, ignoring the impossibility of her situation was clarity and acuity. She forgot to be curious about where she was._**

**_Where were the others?_**

**Wake up.**

**_They had gone... they were asleep as well, with her, she remembered slowly. Ice and fog settled over her brain with the creeping slowness of death in a winter's night. They were with her, there, wherever she was, she recalled. She hoped. They might be dead now, too._**

**Jakarel.**

**Wake up.**

**_She wished she could breathe. The absence of even that small habitual, instinctive action was the most alarming thing of all the alarming things she was going through. But she did not fear. There was no reason to fear the slinking death that settled into her and pierced her thoughts._**

**I hear you.**

**Wake up.**

**Wake up, now!**

* * *

"Good morning, Jakarel," Doctor Janssen smiled as he stepped into her room. Dark eyes, open and alert, watched him peel back the curtains that showed the window to the outside world. The sun hadn't even risen yet, but it touched the edges of the horizon with the faintest shade of light blue in the navy of the rest of the sky.

"Good morning, Doctor," Jakarel replied, her voice smooth and emotionless as she sat up. Her nightclothes were modest, but even if she had been naked it wouldn't have stopped her from rising from her sheets and stretching, a habitual practise that had been instilled into her. Her voice was level, but Janssen had _wanted_ that from his children. They wouldn't be worth much if they had been more like him, after all. "What did you have planned for me for today?"

"Training, of course." Lacking as she was with humanity, Jakarel had managed to endear herself to her 'father' with a distinction few others managed. She was the curious one, the 'compassionate' one. A failure to the other Doctors, but a success to Janssen. His children would be the doubters among the clinical Augments. They would be the advisors, the subterfuge artists, the heart and blood. Women, his Augments were, for when the breeding programs began they would be trying to instill some sense of humanity back into their Augmented children. Those fathers of the future generations were much more volatile and aggressive than the mothers, but the mothers shared those traits as well, in excess sometimes. It was this aggressiveness that had those dark burgundy eyes glitter in anticipation at the thought of fighting something, even if it was another one of her sisters. "Doctor Singh and Matthews have brought in a few of their Augments to see the mettle all of you possess."

The anticipation died in Jakarel's body as she looked harder at the scientist-doctor-father. Singhs were notorious for their brutal savagery. Matthews' were infamous for their own clinical violence. Stories had been whispered between the walls for years as to whether the Janssens would have to bear any children for _those_ particular Augments. Violence was exhilarating and liberating, a part of them all and a part of their lives, but to face such decisive brutality and savagery was daunting.

_**T**_**_he memories had finally arrived, she mused._**

**Wake up, Jakarel! Wake up, now!**

They stood there, the fifty of the Janssens, staring impassively at the arriving Matthews' and Singhs. There was tension between them, imperceptible to the humans attending the future of their race and unknown to the scientists, who probably assumed the Augmented women were anticipating the other half of the future. Their future.

They arrived via shuttlebus, the Augments, and were preceded by their own creators and attendants. The Doctors Singh and Matthews were as Jakarel expected them to be from rumour. Singh was Indian and tall, taller than any man Jakarel had ever seen. Matthews was a Russian, dark haired and eyed and cold. He had a friendless face and she could see this absence of kindness in his face. Janssen was, in contrast, as fluffy as a merry little cloud. She understood, suddenly, why it was that he was given the task of raising the females.

The Augmented men came next; a hundred from each Doctor, making the number of men to women in the facility suddenly very unfair. Even in this realisation, the women were confident. They had to be. There was no room for weakness or mercy or compassion amongst the Augments that did not benefit them or the Doctor's plans.

"Good to see you again, Johan," Singh was saying to Janssen. They were shaking hands, cordial as old friends, but was Jakarel imagining the tension in Janssen's face even as he smiled at Singh? She blinked and focused again, finding herself staring at the men from Matthews' group before moving on to Singh's. They all were multi-racial, as was expected. There were reasons for the use of multicultural people, but Jakarel was never in the know about _why_. She did know, however, that she was German, which suited her name fine. However, another of the women named Natalie was Aboriginal from the Americas. There were Spanish and Germans and Indians and Italians and English. She could see the race in some of them as she scanned the line of drawn faces that expressed little in the way of emotions. What they expressed were along the same things she was expressing. There was curiosity, disdain, judgmental stares, and something predatory that she actually lacked. Her instinct was more defensive than offensive as the predatory expressions were saying.

One of the Augments, a tall lissome man with eyes of ice was staring particularly hard at the lot of Janssen's group, although he didn't express the anticipatory lust the rest expressed when the humans were inattentive.

**_Khan._**

He blinked lazily as his eyes flitted across the sinuous women arrayed just for his masculine gaze, and the gazes of the rest of the men. A suspicion niggled in Jakarel's mind that this joining of the three main groups was more purposeful and secretive than she had been led to believe by Janssen. There was lust in the eyes of some of the other men, now, as Janssen began to introduce them. She wondered if they were more knowledgeable about their purpose here.

* * *

**_She wanted to shiver as the cold began to bite her. Her heart wasn't beating, or if it was it beat too slow and quietly, and the lack of blood moving in her limbs let the cold settle deeper onto her. Was she in ice?_**

**Cryogenic sleep.**

**_Cryogenics, she remembered the term. She remembered going to sleep. She remembered Khan standing there, watching as she settled herself into her cocoon, one of seventy-three. Seventy-three Augments that survived the War when there had once been more than five hundred at one point. She remembered closing her eyes as she was sucked into the cold sleep._**

**Don't let it suck you in.**

**Wake up, Jakarel.**

**_She wanted to shiver. She needed to. It would help her warm up. Her limbs weren't there though to move. She didn't have arms or legs or a torso or a head. She was a consciousness with a frigid heart and a frozen brain. She didn't feel pain, but she imagined that she did._**

**Jakarel...**

* * *

**Author's Note: **So, that's the end of the first chapter. Let me know what you think, people. Explanations and stuff are forthcoming in later chapters, but like other stories I write, I will answer some questions sent to me.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: Introductions.**

**_The memories were coming more willingly now. They helped her bide her time as she lay there frozen in her cryotube. She didn't ask how it was that she had a functioning mind without a functioning heart, but she only hoped the changes were for her benefit. Hope, she mused, was something she hadn't experienced before._**

**_She hoped she was merely in a state of change and would soon emerge from her cocoon to show the world how beautiful, and terrible, an Augment could be._**

**Is there anything you would not do for your family?**

**_She heard Khan's voice, resonant in her thoughts, and wanted to tremble with a sudden, rather alarming, burst of emotion. It awoke more memories and she allowed them to wash over her, merely biding her time now. She remembered her first outburst._**

* * *

She was in the lavatory when she heard them, entering when the sounds of passionate moans and rustling clothes reached her sensitive ears. She halted, head tilted, and could almost _feel_ the sound of penetration based on the sultry noises. Her mouth turned down in disgust, but she didn't find it unexpected that there would be those women so enthralled by men that they would ask to be taken in a bathroom.

"You can at least find a room," she said as she entered the lavatory. The lovers ignored her, but she expected no less than that. She walked through to the maintanence closet and rummaged in there, the sounds of pleasure steadily climbing. Names weren't muttered, which brought some sort of amusement for the Augment in the form of half a smile. A steep climax was approaching between two strangers that knew nothing of eachother but what having their bodies pressed close together.

She found what she wanted in the closet. A broom. She tested the strength of it in her hands and then turned to the stall where the lovers were going at it. Shoving the door open, she drew back her arm and brought the broom down on the woman's back, splintering the thing and driving a roar of pain from the woman as her shoulder also cracked.

The beating that followed had no reason, but it was delivered anyway with a broken half of a broom and a savagery unmatched.

She took shots to the face and the chest, but continued to use the piece of wood to beat down the Augments until they could only cower against the toilet and shudder with every cracking blow. Blood and sweat and the fluids from their sex ran on the tiles and on their skin. The violence was unnecessary, but so was the sex these two Augments had been instigated in. Their physical affection disgusted her thoroughly. She had made it so far without physical relationships and would not let her day be ruined by two people that couldn't keep it in their pants long enough to make it to their room.

She snarled under her breath about their impotency as Augments and then shut away the rage that thrummed so headily under her skin and did her business in the lavatory even as the man and woman groaned and recovered in their stall.

* * *

**Jakarel...**

**_She was much more violent than she ever anticipated herself as being, when she thought of it. Cunning, too, when she needed her intelligence. She was not unkind when she didn't want to be but here, now, asleep as she was, she remembered that her type of kindness and her perception of her actions were ones an Augment would still deem as an emotional handicap, despite them being too cruel and hard to understand to any normal human. She remembered the day she met Khan personally. _**

**_He was Singh's favourite. Named for Doctor Noonien Singh, he was the alpha of Singh's Augments. She remembered her disdain at having to face him after her violent outburst._**

**Wake up.**

* * *

It was cold when Janssen found Jakarel after her little scene in the bathroom. She had heard that the Augments lived, as was expected of them, but that they had been damaged severely and were of less value now. He was angry for that. The attack was unprovoked, irregardless of _what_ the two had been doing with eachother. When he was done, he sent her to apologise to Singh for ruining one of his Augments.

His favourite was there with him when Singh invited her in. She flinched at the sight of the strange male who towered over her slight form in a sort of silently menacing way. She ignored him, focused her dark eyes on the Indian, and inclined her head before beginning her apology. She wanted nothing to do with his beloved _Khan_ or any of his other progeny that he gave his last name to. She could feel the icy eyes of the male she hadn't yet personally met boring into her in his calm, cold way.

"My apologies, Doctor Singh," the Augment began, lowering herself into a bow. She always felt like the command to bow before the Doctors was one of the more demeaning methods they had instilled into the Augmented children but bowed nonetheless. She had angered Singh already, she knew it. It wouldn't do to face him as an equal when he wanted her to know she was inferior.

**_But I am superior._**

"I do not know what came over me, but you have my service if you should need it during your stay to make up for your loss," Jakarel continued. Her eyes glared at the ground as she continued to feel Singh's prodigy staring at her. Her frustration was peaking when Singh laughed, just lightly, and she lifted her head to look at him and see what was amusing him.

"So, you're Jakarel," he said. He sounded cordial, as often Janssen did even when he was angry. "I've heard promising things about you, Jakarel. Johan considers you his most promising subject."

"You confuse me, sir. I'm just one piece of Doctor Janssen's Augments," Jakarel was forced to reply. What was Singh even talking about? He found her response amusing, though, and she could feel the silent laughter.

"Have you met my Khan, yet?" He asked. Jakarel was becoming increasingly agitated by the Doctor's lack of care for the broken Augment. She felt like she was sent here for a reason other than to apologise, but she didn't know what. They told the Augments little when they had new tests for them to pass. "I'm sure you've heard of him, though. There are many rumours that circle your compound."

Jakarel took his words as an invitation to leave her bow. She did so gladly, made uncomfortable by the prolonged position. She looked at Khan, seeing him much clearer now that he was closer to her. It was something startling to her that there were more colours in his eyes than blue, although the blue dominated the other colours. Green and gold, an unusual colour in human eyes, glittered among the blue with his thoughts.

"It is pleasant to meet you, Khan Singh," she said, directing her words most formally.

"_Noonien_ Singh," Khan corrected her. He had a chilly voice, seductive in its smooth drawl. "If you insist on formality, Jakarel Janssen, you will address me as Khan Noonien Singh."

Jakarel's temper flared, alarming her with the readiness that it went ablaze, and she faced him fully. He was as arrogant as she had heard. His smile was curling his mouth in a strange way. She wanted to flinch at the predatory set of his face and body, like he was ready to assert his dominance on them all. That was the curse placed upon the males, she knew. Dominance and an increased aggression would push them to fight until the last moment to be the best.

**Superior ability breeds superior ambition.**

"It truly _is _a pleasure to meet you, _Khan Singh_," Jakarel said again. Her small show of independence and the lack of fear of him expressing his aggression seemed to flare his own temper, for his body tightened as though in anticipation. Cold flooded through her veins at the thought of what he could do to her if she pushed him far enough. She wasn't foolish enough to think she could beat down a male like Khan without her broomstick or something else to harden her blows. He would tear her limb from limb if she gave him the chance and her blows would be only enough to bruise and split his skin, which he could heal. She wouldn't be able to recover from the blood loss if he tore off her limbs.

"Play nice," Singh said, calmly. "You are siblings."

Both Augments looked at him sharply. Jakarel almost wanted to laugh when she realised Khan was expressing the same irritation as she was at being bossed around so carelessly by the human Doctor. She had to bear it, though, as he did. They couldn't lift a hand against their creators, their 'fathers'.

* * *

**_Khan, are you awake?_**

**The strongest of us all. He will lead us to our utopia.**

**_Superior ability breeds superior ambition, and he was the heart of our ability. Where is he?_**

**Is there anything you would not do for your family?**

**_He saved them. Is he still alive?_**

**We are all here together. Forever.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three: Rebirth.**

"Stop it!"

"You'll kill him!"

"Let him go, now!"

The shrieks of the human scientists and doctors were shrill on Augment ears. They were ignored, however, as the eyes of the many watched Khan assert his dominance over one of Matthews' Augments. There was no flinching away from this, not for any of them. Jakarel could say that they were entranced by the display of dominance. This was how disputes were solved among the wild beasts in the wild, and this was how they would solve their own disputes in the human habitat they existed in.

Doctor Matthews was there, bleeding from a wound he had attained when his own Augment shoved him aside to get to Khan as women fawned over the superior man. We could smell it, Jakarel thought as she had watched the scene unfold originally. We could smell the dominance on his skin and taste it when he walked by.

She wanted to vomit, sometimes, when he walked by and she wanted to follow him as well.

* * *

**_Khan._**

**Wake up, now!**

**_The cold pushed itself deeper into her. She could feel her skin cracking. Or was that her brain?_**

**Reach for it.**

**_She brushed out of her body, felt the cold cryotube she slumbered within. Heard voices she did not recognise and terminology she didn't understand, yet. Humans speaking English. Accent? She couldn't tell. Her knowledge of English and accents was horribly wanting._**

**Open it.**

**_Open what?_**

* * *

The male Augment died with a sickening tearing sound and a cracking snap of bones and sinews as Khan literally ripped his heart out of his chest.

They blinked then when the body slumped to the ground. Men and women alike, all Augments, stared as Alexander Derek Matthews died in his own blood. His heart beat furiously for those last few moments before falling still, after which Khan threw the bloody organ back down onto the dead shell it belonged to and turned away from the body.

Matthews rose from where he had fallen and ran forward to the body of his personal favourite Augment, the shock and anger on his face making even Jakarel stare. The amount of emotions he expressed was the most alluring thing she had seen. There was something horribly beautiful in that amount of wrath and sorrow. She wished she knew what it felt like to feel that.

* * *

**_But she did feel that, already._**

**We must leave.**

**Is there anything you would not do for your family?**

**_S.S Botany Bay, our ark. Khan Noonien Singh, our Noah. And we, the seventy-three animals to be taken through the remnants of our old world to the new world promised to us._**

**Open it.**

**_Open what?_**

* * *

Matthews rose from the body of his prized Augment, his hands shaking with his fury as he faced Khan. The other humans that had watched continued to do so, too frightened of the Augment to run to the aid of the dead one. Jakarel did not blame the fragile creatures. They would not make it to the scene before the other Augments came to Khan's aid, even though he wouldn't have needed them to. He had claimed dominance over them, though, and even Jakarel felt the need to protect that small instance of godliness in their cold, clinical, most logical world.

"How dare you?!" Matthews bellowed. His small face was pinched up in fury, his voice pierced the ears of the assembled sharply. Augment bodies tensed, ready for the merest sign that Khan wanted them, needed them, so that they might fall upon the human that had created some of their number.

Khan gave the human a single look that would have withered any one of his newfound pack. The human and his arrogance, though, did not see the threat in the strange eyes that stared down at him so disdainfully. No, instead of withering as any one of the Augments might have, Derek Matthews straightened and struck the Augment hard, cracking his own hand on Khan's jaw and managing to break Khan's skin and draw blood.

Weakness was embodied by the spilling of blood, and so was strength. It mattered most who had drawn the blood. Matthews wore a ring, Khan's rule was unchallenged by the human. His new followers stepped forward, anticipating Khan's sign, and remained that way when the security and other doctors and scientists filed into the training room, pushing forward through the Augments towards the scene. Khan and Matthews stared at eachother, though, long and hard. Neither of them were backing down, that was obvious. Jakarel felt the excitement thrum through her limbs as heady anticipation filled the air.

Finally, Khan bowed to show his deference. The Augments relaxed. Matthews fumed. And Singh arrived.

* * *

**Can't you hear us?**

**_Khan saved us when we were dying. He brought us to his Ark, placed us in our cells. Have we arrived to our brave new world, yet?_**

**He used them against me, my friends.**

**_Where are you? I can hear you._**

**Is there anything you would not do for your family?**

**_I can feel your sorrow._**

* * *

Singh's fury was monumental, but it was not directed at _his_ beloved Khan. He turned on Matthews and Khan's amusement was a physical thing when he turned away from the screaming humans. Security guards stood ready to take him away, but hesitant to touch him after seeing the corpse cooling at his feet. Doctors darted forth, though. Actual medics rather than scientists, they were doing the bare necessities now to ensure a quick cleanup rather than prolonging it. They had been trained well.

Khan walked past the guards and medics, joined with his own brothers and sisters, and allowed them to fawn over him with the barest of tolerance. Jakarel had to fight the instinct to do the same. She had made it clear she disliked being near Khan before when he had walked past and he had made it clear that he did not want her near him at all either. Their agreement was one of mutual dislike.

She couldn't help but feel when his beautiful, strange eyes settled on her that he was threatening her. He would not allow competition and with Matthews' pet dead, Janssen's was the one remaining pet project. She returned the gaze, placing in her eyes the same superiority she saw in his.

She would die, if he had the chance to kill her. He would dominate her no differently than he had dominated the male.

**You need to wake up. He needs us.**

**Open it.**

She watched her back ceaselessly after that. She was ready for him when she entered her room, when she crept into the lavatory, when she lingered in the lab after her tests. After the training simulations, she expected to see his face and feel his hands around her throat.

Fear was a new emotion for her.

"Superior ability breeds superior ambition," Janssen was saying, startling Jakarel from her thoughts. She looked at him sharply, dark eyes wide. He smiled at her comfortingly but she was not comforted. Humans couldn't hope to understand Augments. "I can make you superior."

**_I am superior._**

"I am superior," Jakarel stated automatically.

"You are incomplete," Janssen said immediately. That smile was magnetic. She didn't trust it. "You feel fear, the readings are clear in this. I can fix that."

Jakarel did not respond to her father, her face carefully devoid of emotion. Control helped when she didn't want the humans to read her, but if an Augment had stood in the room with her they would see the emotion in her eyes. As it was, Janssen could read her on the machines he had her wired into.

"How?" She asked him. She wanted to flinch at the eagerness she heard in her own voice. She didn't want to trust to the human and his attempt at instilling hope in her. He reached to pet her hair, running his long fingers through the blonde, and she leaned away. She hated it when he touched her like that. She was his pet, though. She had to remember that he expected her to play the part.

She wanted to rip out his heart the same way Khan had ripped out Alexander's. Maybe she would go the additional distance and eat it while he still struggled to live on the ground, though, so he would feel that heart wrenching fear that he had sought to remove from humanity with the conception of the Augmented race.

"Hold still." He replied, smiling through his teeth at her. She felt threatened.

He reached for a syringe sitting on the little metal tray on the table next to the machines she was wired into. Her heart monitor began to beep faster as he uncapped the syringe. Her fear of needles was crippling, sometimes.

He stuck the needle into her arm, the uncomfortable pinch a reminder that she was, even now, a human in the basest sense. She flinched as he pressed down on the plunger. It didn't occur to her immediately that he chose not to test for the vein first, but it went unquestioned once she realised his error. Her faith in him might not have been outstanding, yet she did trust him enough to not intentionally damage her without just cause.

He removed the needle and placed it aside again on the tray. She held down on the place he had stuck her with it, placing pressure on the wound as her body recovered. He then sat there and watched her. She didn't remember it when she fell unconscious.

**If you don't get out soon, you'll never be free.**

Jakarel woke with a pounding headache that soon faded into memory. She remembered her room and the glaring light stuck into the ceiling. She could smell her mattress and Janssen, who so often enjoyed coming in and talking with her. She could smell him now, him reeking of chemicals and pain. She heard his heartbeat and the breath rattling in his lungs. She could even hear his clothing rustle as he breathed, the imperceptible sound like two pieces of dry paper rubbing together.

**_I feel nothing._**

"What did you do to me?" Jakarel asked as soon as she had found her voice. She felt her throat was raw, as though she had been screaming. There was no pain, no fear. The loss was disorienting.

"I augmented your abilities further," Janssen's explanation was immediate. She wondered if she should feel privileged that he was confiding information in her, but she did not feel anything other than a slow flow of disdain and anger. He was weaker than her; she could see the frailty in him when she looked at him. "Jakarel, how do you feel?"

"I do not feel," she said. Her voice was soft, but deceptive.

Janssen seemed proud.

"You have a series of tests to complete today before I can let you free on the compound," he said. She could hear his excitement. His heart was beating faster. She curled her fingers to stop herself from reaching over and silencing that annoying flutter in his chest. "Jakarel _Zenzi _Janssen."

She remembered what the second name was supposed to symbolise. She remembered it and disliked it.

If she killed everybody in the compound, he would be the first to die.

She was nobody's pet.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four: War**

**_She could feel the electricity thrumming through the cryotube, keeping her under its chilly grasp. She wanted to rip the wires apart so she could wake up, finally. She needed to get out. Khan needed her. Her family needed her. She could help them. She needed their help, too._**

**Jakarel. You need to open it.**

**_She wished she could remember whose voice was speaking to her. Was that Jakobi? No, it sounded like Yumei._**

**It doesn't matter. Just open it.**

**_She brushed against the wires, testing them with incorporeal fingers. She couldn't see them. Her vision was black, still. There was nothing to tell what wires she was touching, and she had never been fascinated by mechanics and so didn't know what to do._**

* * *

"I do not want a fight, Khan."

He had her pinned underneath him, straddling her waist and pinning her arms with his knees as his hands rested threateningly on her neck, ready to squeeze and twist and tear her throat out. His fingers tightened on her neck but she did not respond with fear. She blinked at him, calmly. Janssen had been honest when he gave her another augmentation. She could be as calm as him, now.

"What do you want, then?" Khan asked. She shuddered at his voice. He could feel it through his fingers but she was grateful when he didn't react to it. If every man had a voice as deep as his, no woman would be able to resist.

"Your help," she said.

He did not respond. She let him bear over her and keep her pinned down. Even the new augmentation did not give her strength to match his. She was as weak as ever physically. It affected her mental functions.

"I want to be free," she said. She couldn't even explain her desire to be free of the humans, but she assumed another Augment would understand. They had been raised to be superior, which was what they had been told repeatedly by their fathers and the attendants and doctors that tested and assisted them. They were the future and here they were, enslaved to the past. Khan would understand if nobody else did. "I want to be what they made me to be, and for that I want them to be dead."

Khan considered her for a long time, keeping her pinned while he did. She could see the cogs working behind his eyes. There was something alluring about them, now that she could see him at this closest angle. She could see that his eyes had different patterns of blue, gold, and green in them. How anybody could refuse the man with those eyes was beyond her.

* * *

**Freedom is a matter of perspective. You can never be free until you free yourself, but how many of us truly realise that we are our own prisoners?**

**_She wished she could see Khan. He would know what to do to get them out of this situation._**

**Is there anything you would not do for your family?**

**_She heard him, again. His voice echoing in her thoughts, repeating that line over and over until she wanted to claw out her ears so his voice would stop echoing. She could feel the pain in his voice, that alien thing that he so rarely suffered. She wanted to tell him that they were safe. But how could she? She was frozen, inside and outside._**

**...for your family?**

**_She would have died for Khan, for their family. She killed for them and helped to save them. When they fell upon Europe and Asia and exacted their horrible vengeance upon the humans, she had done what she did for her family._**

**He wanted to exploit my savagery!**

**_Confusion filled her as Khan's voice roared through her mind before fading away. She couldn't hear him anymore and she clutched at the memory of his voice when they had thought that they had won._**

**_She tugged on the wires._**

* * *

"We will take the compound, and then the city, and move on to the world." Khan was telling the Augments. They were supposed to be training under supervision. The men who were to supervise them lay dead, though, having their necks snapped. Their bodies were left in the monitoring station in their seats to give the illusion that nothing was amiss. When they had been discovered, there would be a reckoning for the humans to deal with. "We will be the future they promised that we were, and when our glorious work is done we can bring peace to this world, finally."

Jakarel couldn't help but think that Khan certainly sounded confident in his abilities to lead them to their victory. His arrogance did not deflect the attention he didn't seem to appreciate. She was happy to have convinced him to assist her in her endeavor to be free. His charm would win them the other Augments still locked in their facilities. The liberation would come.

She nodded at him when he looked at her. Her assent signalled that she was submitting to his dominance. The chain of command was his alone to dictate. She did not want him to be her enemy, not yet.

**He needs you.**

The other Augments muttered amongst themselves. Their words were not of fear or doubt, however. They had the dreams that Jakarel and Khan shared. They were brothers and sisters, every single one of them, and blood ran thick.

They waited, now.

* * *

**_She ripped the wires out._**

**No!**

**_She remembered she had to key in the code. It was getting colder. She had to get out before she froze entirely and became as worthless as the doctor who created her._**

**Hurry!**

**_She found the number pad and felt the buttons. She brushed over them all, feeling for the digital readout that would tell her which side was up. She found it and returned to the numbers. Her password came easily, because she had told Khan she wanted it for herself when he was programming the cryotubes._**

**_The hiss of the releasing pent up air was loud, but she didn't even actually hear it. She felt it as though it were brushing across her skin, ghosting over her hand like a breeze. The voices had been long gone, but they would return. She had to be free before they came back._**

**_The cryotube opened._**

* * *

"Why are you doing this?" Janssen cried as Jakarel lifted him back to his feet. Blood matted in his hair and streaked over his face. Her hands were red with the blood of his security guards. Khan was there, dealing with Singh on his own, but Jakarel didn't care. "I created you! You are my own flesh and blood!"

She knew that.

"You are not my family," she snarled. Her frustration with the events of the day and just how hard it had been to get this far with only a handful of others fueled the rage in her. She closed her free hand around Janssen's throat. "You should have never given me life."

She squeezed him until he cracked and broke in her arms, crushing his windpipe and compressing it hard enough to split his skin apart. Blood exploded from the wounds. She was happy he was dead as she let him drop. She knew the plan for the Augments when the time came and they were ready for the next step in the program. She was glad, even though she didn't know enough of happiness to understand what it was that she was actually feeling.

There was a crack and a wet gurgle as Khan finished with Singh. She turned to look at him, knowing that they had both freed themselves from the rule of their creators.

"I don't want to be Janssen any longer," she told Khan. The abrupt statement failed to surprise him. She wasn't trying to surprise him. She watched his cold eyes watch her as she wiped the blood from her hands onto her torn shirt. "Jakarel Zenzi will do."

"If that's what you want," Khan said. He smiled that unnerving smile of his and reached for her. She brushed away his hand, unwilling to have him touch her so after they had killed their own fathers. He snapped his other hand out though, grabbed her arm, and pulled her closer. She remembered that he did not like to be refused anything after he had been spoiled so much by his followers. She couldn't stand being so close to him and feeling the heat of his body against hers. She could smell the death on him. Why did that make her want to pull him closer?

"Let go of me, Khan," she said. Her voice was low. He heard her clearly, though, for his mouth turned up sharper in a wider smirk. His arrogance made her want to shove him into a furnace. He held her for a moment longer and she understood.

She raised a hand and brushed it along his cheek, feeling the hard line of his cheekbone against her fingertips. Their skin was sensitive, much more than a human's was, and she knew he could feel her touch as though she were pressing against the nerves even though her fingers were feather light. He responded in kind.

**Hurry!**

They emerged from the room where so much death had taken place and came face to face with the others. They filled the hall, every single one of the Augments in the compound. Jakarel was glad again when she realised that they seemed to have no lost anybody. Her family was powerful. They could not lose.

Jakarel smiled at them, her first real smile since she was far younger. Her pride glowed within her as she looked over the faces of her brothers and sisters. Blood ran on their skin, stained their hands. Jakobi seemed to have been shot at some point, but even as she watched him his skin began to peel back together.

They were created by the humans to lead their world into a brave new future. They did not expect the children they had reinforced the image of a utopia to finally reach out and seize what was promised to them.

* * *

**_She exhaled slowly into the cool air, felt the warmth return to her extremities slowly. It burned, the sudden heat. It made her feel alive, that pain. The cryotube was open to the air and she could hear clearly now. The hum of other cryotubes, the hiss of exhaust, and the silence that told her there was no other person present to see her._**

**_Jakarel waited._**


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five: Emergence.**

**_I can't breathe._**

**You're free. That is all that matters.**

**_She sat up in the cryotube and shuddered. Weakness sagged down on her, weighted her bones, and she vomited. She fell still, sitting there against the rim of her cryotube, hearing the incessant beeping of the alarm in her ears. She wondered if anybody would hear her, and if she would have the strength to fight them off when they came._**

**_She choked and vomited again when she took her first breath, making a mess of her frozen clothing._**

* * *

Khan brushed his hand against hers as he passed by on the way out of the main doors. Blood mixed with blood as they touched but they said no words. No words needed to be said. They were free. Janssen, Singh, and Matthews lay dead in their offices. The doctors and scientists that had helped in keeping them captive were no better, although they had not suffered as much as the head Doctors had.

Two hundred and forty-seven Augments emerged from the New Austrian Eugenics Laboratories. The sun was bright, making the Augments flinch before their eyes adjusted to the light. New Austria was beautiful. Before, when Jakarel had gone on visits to the city to demonstrate humanity's bright future, she had found it as entrapping as the compound they had removed her from. Now, it symbolised her freedom.

"We are free!" Hiltraude cried out, her voice loud in the air. The roar of the Augments chilled Jakarel's blood and her smile grew wider. Khan smiled widely as well. Jakarel imagined that the world was weeping at the ferocity it would soon bear.

* * *

New Austria fell easily enough when the Augments rushed upon it in the quiet of night. Nobody had yet realised that the Eugenics Laboratory had been taken already and so didn't expect the nameless men and women that began to creep into the city to be murderers. The sheer amount of them was alarming on its own, and warning alarms must have rung loudly in the heads of the officials of the city, but the fortifications of human might crumbled easily under the onslaught of augmented strength.

The only thing that saved any of the humans was their surrender. They had done nothing wrong to earn the outstanding ire of the Augments. No, that was reserved for when they came across the other Eugenics Laboratories. They knew the location of some of them, namely those in Europe as New Austria's had been, but there were some in Asia and Africa. The ones in Japan and China would be their targets after they had liberated Europe.

Surrender did not save the politicians nor the armed forces that protected the city. Jakarel wanted to call them New Austria's security guards, but that wasn't their true name. She had heard the proper name before but forgotten it in the long years that had passed while she was locked away in the compound.

Khan himself found and killed the leader of the city and installed Jakobi as the new leader in his stead. This was something the Augments had to agree upon before they rushed the city. Burning it down wasn't much of an option, not if they wanted to earn the world as their kingdom. No king lasted long when they killed large numbers of their subjects, and New Austria had a very large population. No, they needed to install a leader. Jakobi was a kinder Augment than most and would suit the position well enough. As one of Matthews' Augments, he had that cold logic Matthews prided himself on. He handpicked his own security force, all from the Matthews Augments, and they left him there to direct the city as he wanted. He was logical and humanitarian enough to understand the needs of the many humans under his control now. They trusted him to make the humans in New Austria thrive.

They stayed in New Austria for a few days as they worked on a plan to take the other cities in the German Alliance. They might have moved on right away if they had thought they couldn't be taken down by the humans, but in the taking of New Austria one of their number had fallen to the security and the bullets used on them.

Guns, they decided, would be their downfall if they didn't take care to realise that they could fell even an Augment. After all, Augments were human still, in some ways.

Khan expected Jakarel to stay with him while they lived in New Austria. She did not, unless he requested it personally. She had to get used to it, this strange relationship they had wordlessly agreed upon in the compound. He didn't. He got what he wanted, and if he wanted her than she would not resist him. Those cold eyes promised pain if she refused, although when he invited her to come to him his voice implied that he wanted her to do what _she _wanted. He was all about giving independence a leash.

* * *

**_She blinked her eyes open, alarmed that she had drifted off, and began to cough to clear her lungs of the clotting cold left in there._**

**After all, no ship should go down without her captain!**

**_Ships? Captains? She could not feel the movement that told her they were moving. No, she must have been imagining Khan speaking those words._**

**_She raised her hand and rubbed at her eyes. They burned as though she were exhausted and hadn't been sleeping for the past..._**

**_She didn't know how long she was asleep._**

**Three hundred years.**

**_Did we survive? All of us?_**

* * *

That first night had been the hardest. Khan was not gentle, nor did he have the right to be. They were Augments. Violence was in their life, strength in their blood, and it was their nature to dominate. He was everything they had wanted the Augments to be.

Before he took her, Jakarel had avoided physical relationships with the other women Janssen had bred, even though it was not the best kept secret that the women had participated in sex with eachother wherever they could. It did not appeal to Jakarel to be with another woman, even if they created their own phallic objects to use on one another. She did not have romantic thoughts that one day she would be paired with an Augment she would want physically either. No, she wanted nothing of the sort.

And then Khan touched her, as men touch their women, and she wanted him.

He moved slowly enough for her, bringing her through the stages of seduction with his hands before moving forward into that joining that made her his, for as long as he wanted her.

He was one with her completely. She felt like he had settled deep into her womb and made her his so completely she felt like she was falling apart. Falling apart in the best sense, though. She felt the tearing of her purity and it elicited a cry from deep in her chest that he had breached that most innocent part of her. She felt him settle his hips against her hips and hold still as though to reinforce in her mind that she was his and there was no escaping that.

Still, there were no words to address this joining. She did not moan for him and he did not mutter for her. The sounds they made were of the pleasure they were feeling. Khan was everywhere, inside and outside. The perfection was like nothing she had ever experienced before. There was no denying the way he felt in her was anything short of amazing. An Augment couldn't feel love, not in the way a human did, but she did feel the drive to claim him as her possession. He was their leader yet he could still be claimed. She did so.

It reminded her of the couple she had found in the lavatory in the compound, yet she wasn't inclined to find something to beat the man with. No, he was hers. She wouldn't touch him to hurt him unless he asked for it, just as he would ask her before he hurt her. She expected him to ask, anyway.

They ended with the gasp of their names. Their mouths brushed as he slumped against her, their slick skin sticking as he settled over her body. That touch of their lips was as loving as they would have gotten. They had not kissed before they began.

He tasted the way she expected him to, like strength and virility and domination as heady and sweet as his scent. She didn't know what he thought of her when he tasted her. There was no asking. Like many things, he would tell her when he wanted to tell her.

* * *

**_Her flesh prickled as it warmed, discomfort nagged at her as water from the ice that had covered her slid down her skin. She was breathing easier now that she had gotten the ice from her chest but every beat of her heart reminded her that she was still cold. Nobody had come to investigate the sounds, yet, for which she felt grateful. She wasn't ready for the conflict._**

**_She began to move, to pull herself out of her cryotube, and heaved dryly with the attempt. She was still too weak. She wanted to punch something for her weakness._**

**Breathe. Watch. Listen.**

**_She did so. She bided her time as strength slowly returned to her muscles. As she waited, she looked around. The lines of cryotubes lay neat and orderly all around her. The hissing of exhaust was from them. Able to count based on what she saw, she noted the other seventy-three tubes and was glad, again, in that strange way. She anticipated that their new keepers would not retain a dead Augment and his cryotube. That told her they were all alive._**

**_And Khan was there with them._**


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note: **Basically filler while the character recovers highlighting some crucial points of the past. Next chapter, the format will change. If you're reading this Note, please bear with it. Flashbacks will be bolded and the current time will be in plain text. Next chapter, though. So, yeah. Bear with it. J

* * *

**Chapter Six: Past.**

They were like a plague upon Germany, sweeping forth from New Austria without warning and wresting the control of the nearby cities from the politicians and scientists there. They liberated their fellow Augments, all of whom accepted their cause as just. Jakarel had faith that they would be nothing short of supportive and they proved to be the greatest of benefits. They were joined by Kaulitzes, Geoffs, Frederiks, and Yolands. The finding of the females in Euschwetz was a revelation to the Janssen Augments. There had been so few females of their calibre in their lives. Finally, there were more women to be bickered over.

Nobody bickered over Jakarel. She was Khan's, and the men and women knew that she belonged to their leader and would not suffer the advances of the lesser brothers and sisters that sought to have her as well.

The world was at war, they saw the papers every day, but the war did not hinder their cause. No, for the first few weeks, the Germans assumed they were being attacked by the English and the French. When the attacks began to spread out as the Augments separated to raze the land in different directions, the humans began to realise that things weren't as they seemed.

Khan and his personal group struck east towards India where the Singhs had originated from. Splinter factions went south, delving into Africa and the Middle East, and the last dregs of their people that decided to go on their own went across the ocean to find their kingdoms in the Americas. They lost often in their endeavors as they split apart more and more. Still, the Augments won what they set their sights on. Nobody could face the fury of a survivor among the bodies of her dead brothers and sisters and the humans soon learned to expect that. They figured out, eventually, that their attackers were those Augments they had put so much hope into. They had no plan to deal with the Augments, though, other than to pump them so full of bullets and biological weapons the Augments would fail to recover from. If it had gone on for any longer, the world might have cracked and died under the weight of the war.

At one point, there were a few thousand Augments from the nations in the world. Jakarel, upon hearing the news, had been glad enough to laugh.

She was regaining some semblance of her humanity the longer she spent with her kind, like only they could stir in her the feelings that fueled the humans they killed. Jakarel found that she was dependent on them, her family, and that without them she would likely still be stuck in New Austria, popping out squalling infants of pure Augment lineage.

* * *

Time passed by Khan led his people to his homeland, leaving in his wake men and women to rule cities he had 'liberated' from the oppression of humans. His logic was undeniable in the situation whenever he named another Augment as a leader. It was the right way of things, in the end. Humans weren't fit to rule humans.

If the Augments were to bring peace to the world, they would have to lead the world themselves and not trust the faulty nature of humanity to lead the future to the utopia they dreamed of.

Khan took Jakarel when he wanted her, offering her the choice to refuse him if that was what she wanted, but she did not resist him. How could she? She left like they had been made for one another and that, in the eventuality that the breeding program would have begun, she would have been implanted with an embryo born from the joining of their reproductive fluids. It was a surprise to her that after their months on the road she had not succumbed to pregnancy yet. She investigated the next time they came across a eugenics laboratory and found out the truth of it.

The females were infertile.

* * *

Khan did not respond favourably to the news that pureborn Augments would be impossible. Jakarel understood the anger she felt radiating from him. How could they be the future if there was no possibility of creating it themselves? No, they would have to find a way to reproduce amongst themselves or in a century and a half there would be no Augments to keep the peace.

If there was one thing Jakarel understood, it was genetics and biochemistry. Khan had to use the equipment they found in one of the liberated compounds of Mumbai. Her technical knowledge was lacking, admittedly, and she didn't lie about it. Khan was better than her, at almost everything in general, but he deferred to her knowledge about reproduction.

Some things learned from books shoved towards her in New Austria managed to stick with her.

Perhaps Janssen had been grooming her to be the Augment's very own reproductive scientist.

Or something along those lines.

She couldn't even figure out what she was made to do. It aggravated her.

They lingered in Mumbai as Jakarel tried to figure out their problem. They had taken to asking other Augments to assist and go through various experiments to make them fertile. Nothing had succeeded and Jakarel couldn't understand. The longer it took to correct this one little overlooked fact, the more frustrated the Augments became with the entire situation. Mumbai had ceased to amuse them, they had grown bored and weary of India's climate. Khan liked to think that soon their group would splinter again, and he didn't know whether that was good or bad. He liked thinking some of them would move south and east again, into the Philippines and maybe eventually across to Australia, their untested territory.

Khan wouldn't move on Australia himself, not yet. He wanted Asia first.

* * *

The fracturing of the Augments in Mumbai came when Arabella Paez killed a group of human males in a bar one night, out of boredom. Khan would not stand for the unprovoked killing of _his_ subjects. He killed Arabella the first moment he saw her.

Her mate did not take her death lightly, considering all he had done to claim her as his in the first place.

Rather than confront Khan, though, he rallied a group of Augments that shared his personal goals and abandoned Khan and Jakarel in the dead of night.

Jakarel was happy, in her perverse way, because she did not look forward to seeing her people die without cause.

Khan told her she was growing too human even while he comforted her with a hand stroking through her hair. She repeated his words to him, pointing out the way he was acting, and he smiled that strange smile of his.

There was a reason for it.

* * *

He was loosening the leash he kept on their independence gradually. His speeches, when delivered, were losing the fanatical edge and were passionate in their warmth for his people, his family.

Jakarel feared they were devolving. There was no living Doctors, though, to assuage her fears or to admit to her the truth, not in this part of India. Khan held faith that there were Doctors in Hampi and Nolanda that would shed light on the new changes.

Jakarel often wished she could share in Khan's faith, but the changes in her emotional temperament were alike to his. She was warming up. She was growing closer to her family, as well.

Perhaps, she speculated, the Augments were developing societal bonds that humans had in their early days as hunters and gatherers in the primordial world. It was a part of their nature, she reasoned with herself. The comfort her reasoning provided to her was short lived and feeble.

How could they be superior if they still answered to the same emotional ties as humans?

* * *

Khan told her about his youth in the Eugenics Department of India, in Nolanda, on one of the drawn nights as the Augments migrated across India to his homeland. She had asked about it, her first query as to the life he may have lived at one point, and to her surprise he had replied to her. She trusted his word. Lies were pointless when he could have refused her.

"Unlike you, I was not Singh's favourite until he found those he had used his DNA for personally were less than suited for what he planned for his Augments," Khan began. Jakarel knew already that she was special, at least amongst Janssen's Augments, for she alone bore the late Doctor's DNA. "When he found his progeny lacking, he discovered my talents and latched on like a leech to a bloody cut under water."

"A delightful simile," Jakarel muttered. Khan ignored her.

He described his youth with that perfect clinical detail she had come to expect of him. He described the savage years of his adolescence when frustration had him fighting to near death with other Augments to the point that the prospect of going against him was enough to make someone back down. She knew how violent he could be. He killed Arabella in a single precise strike. He could do the same to any one of them.

There was a reason he led them. He was the best of them all.

He described Singh's goals for his Augments and the rest of the bunch of them they had left in Nolanda. Singh had wanted warriors and that was what he had received, but his warriors were volatile and hard to control. Janssen came on board with the eugenics program when Singh sought out scientists with the knowledge to breed back something less inhospitable in their Augments. Janssen had created his first generation, the generation Jakarel came from, within weeks of being recruited by Singh. Khan was already a young man when he had heard of the future of their breed being developed in Germany.

Khan told her of the small little rebellion that had thrived under the scrutiny of the scientists during his stay in Nolanda. They had planned to liberate themselves from the control of their human creators but their plans were thrown off when Singh had separated them all and shipped some off to Germany to meet these females. The rest were sent to Japan to meet the females being bred there.

Khan's life, while it had been lived longer than she had lived her own life, sounded much the same way hers had been as she grew up. She told him about her life in turn and the way of life she had been forced to survive. Humans shouldn't lord over Augments. It was wrong.

It didn't occur to them that the humans felt the same way about the Augments.

* * *

**Author's Note: **I'm probably insane for writing a story like this, but I'm grateful for the support I've been getting about it. Kudos to the three people who reviewed for me, the sixteen following my story at the time I posted this chapter, and the seven who favourited it. You guys are great.


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note: **So, a little bit about how I named my Augments, because I think if I don't at least try to explain I might actually confuse some of my readers, and I don't want that.

In my little take on the Eugenics War, there are a total of twenty scientists involved in the creation of the eugenics species. The Augments created by these doctors are classified as Augments and distinguished from one another at the same time by carrying the name of the head Doctor of their compound as their surname. Therefore, Jakarel is one of fifty Janssens, Khan is one of two hundred Singhs, and Jakobi is one of the five hundred men named Matthews. For distinction among their peers, certain Augments were given a second name, typically the name of the head Doctor that also gave them their surname. Therefore, Noonien Singh named his favourite as Khan Noonien Singh. This is different for those Augments with creators of a different sex, as with Jakarel, who was given the second name Zenzi instead of Johan. The names given in this regard are taken from the scientist's imagination or from somebody close to them.

So, that's my little thing regarding the names. Particular, isn't it? Of course, most Augments no longer keep the names the humans that created them gave them. The few that did have their reasons and those reasons aren't really that important right now, if ever.

* * *

**Chapter Seven: Hope not.**

Jakarel had managed to free herself from her cryotube and pull herself to standing from where she had collapsed to the ground. She couldn't hold back the heaving that followed the dizziness as she stood. A momentary show of weakness was embodied in her clasping her hand against the rim of the open cryotube. She was so glad the others weren't awake to see this.

When she was certain she wouldn't collapse, Jakarel stumbled across to the adjacent cryotube in her row, faltering in those last steps and grunting as she unintentionally rammed into the cold machine. Peering in, she felt something alike to disappointment at the sight of the face inside.

It was Hiltraude, one of her sisters.

_Open it._

Jakarel input the password that would release Hiltraude from her icy prison, hearing the gratifying hiss of success and smiling thinly. She listened keenly for the sounds of voices approaching, or for alarms ringing. The room was quiet, though, save for her breathing and the hissing of the cryotubes contained within it. There was something to be glad for in the lack of interest shown to the cryotubes. If Jakarel knew any better, she might have realised just how long the Augments had been imprisoned by whomever was keeping them wherever they were.

Hiltraude was breathing evenly when Jakarel moved on and released the next handful of Augments from their icy tubes, allowing her closest friends, her beloved family, free again at last.

Jakobi, her favourite brother, was the last to be released when Jakarel heard that telltale sound of approaching footsteps hurrying to the holding area the cryotubes were being held in. She turned to glance at the door, burgundy eyes glaring at the approaching intrusion, and darted for it before it slid open and admitted the security force that would undoubtly have come to apprehend her.

Hiltraude, Olsen, Corrine, and Aislin were aware of the noises as well and looked to _her_ for direction on how to respond. The realisation that she had become their leader while Khan slumbered in whatever cryotube he was kept in was received and understood quickly and without question. Silently, she pointed and gave her brothers and sisters their directions. They fanned out in response, Aislin remaining nearby to tend to Jakobi and keep him quiet, while Jakarel ran for the entrance.

Rows and rows of frozen faces that appeared dead lined the slim walkway Jakarel followed to get to the door. By the muffled sounds of approaching people, she could tell that they were almost at the door now and she kicked in another burst of speed.

As the door opened, Jakarel lunged forward and seized the first man she saw by the collar of his shirt before throwing him into the room behind her, displaying the might of the Augments with that one action. One of the others dispatched the man with their bare hands, punching and beating the human into submission before ending his miserable life. Meanwhile, Jakarel had moved on to the other man, grabbing him by his shoulders and throwing him against the wall before bringing her knee up into his groin, effectively crippling the man. He raised his gun to fire even while he shouted out with the pain and she seized his wrist and squeezed it in her hand. She felt his frail bones crack and splinter under her tight grasp and the additional gasp of pain he released was as gratifying as the sound of climax.

She smiled a feral grin and dragged the human back into the storage room. His gun dropped to the ground to be picked up by Hiltraude, who followed Jakarel and her stumbling prisoner. The man cried out with every step, irritating Jakarel, and she glared at him before realising the dark patch spreading across his pants.

She had hurt him harder than she thought.

Had humans really gotten so weak while they were sleeping?

She had noticed the man was human, after all. There was no mistaking that pathetic human instinct to flee or fight glimmer in his eyes before she snapped the bones in his wrist as easily as a child would snap a thin twig. He did not accompany her willingly, even now, and she suspected he was pretending to be so heavily crippled rather than that he was actually that crippled. Perhaps, though, she overestimated the strength of a human male when his groin had been, most literally, crushed.

She shoved him against one of the closed cryotubes, leaving behind a smear of claret when he slumped to the ground with another drawn out groan. Jakarel had to hold back from drawing her hand across his face and possibly breaking his jaw. Silence him though it would, it would also make him completely useless.

"Where are we?" She demanded of the human. He was in too much pain to reply, instead just sitting there and making a strange noise she realised eventually was him weeping. Disgust resonated in her heart at the sight. She kicked his leg and he jolted as though her foot had driven a long spike into his flesh. Looking down at him when he looked up at her, the sight of tears streaking his face was morally wrong to her. She wanted to shake him and tell him that he could be better than that, but she withstood the desire to treat him as something more than a snivelling pup. The memory of their betrayal so many years ago was still fresh in her mind, as though it had happened only earlier that day.

* * *

**Nolanda was visible on the horizon when the Augments stopped for the night in the sleaziest of Indian motels. The owner had been pacified by threats and kept to himself, mostly, while the hundred Augments made his establishment theirs. Compared to the cities they had left behind when they split again a day east of Mumbai, the motel and the town it lay within was quiet. The presence of the humans wasn't so oppressive. **

**Tempers were high among their group at the difficulty of moving across such a heavily populated country with so few numbers. There were murmurs of dissent in the quiet evenings as men and women alike complained about the living conditions, the presence of so many humans, and just how many of their own they had lost in this endeavor to bring peace to the war stricken world.**

**Like so many other things Jakarel understood, she agreed with her disillusioned brothers and sisters. If she had known how much they would have had to sacrifice just to get this far, she might have told Khan to keep the group together as long as possible to save them so many losses.**

**The only part of their life she truly wished she could go without was the presence of the damnable insects that stung her during every waking moment and that buzzed too loudly beyond the walls of the rooms the Augments kept. Her irritation only served to amuse Khan. His irritation with the same insects amused her. It was another one of their little games to bide their time. One could look at them and see a frustrated couple swatting at the air and not notice anything playful about it, but one of the more observant people could see them peering out of the corner of their eyes at eachother and the way secretive smirks flitted across their faces once they had looked away from eachother.**

**Others were playing similar games as the Augments organised themselves. Perhaps the tension and the thought of the hard fighting ahead was making them fall into those nervous habits the other species had developed to deal with stress was being embodied by the games they played amongst themselves. Arrogance dictated that they were above stress.**

**Stress was gnawing at them nonetheless.**

**Their stay in that motel was quiet, punctuated only by the sounds of pain and violence and pleasure as Jakarel's family excersized their needs in whatever ways they pleased. She stayed with Khan, as loyal as any in her position could be, and found her amusement in the dead hours of the night by playing far more lecherous games with the man humans would call her lover.**

**The day came early at this time of the year with the bright sound of birdsong. They rose early, as always, and paid the owner of the motel for keeping them and not trying to kill them. Their rewards were generous. Loyalists to their cause were always well received and they truly believed the man to be a loyalist.**

**The bomb proved otherwise.**

**Everybody was loading into their vehicles when the first to be ready started the engine. Jakarel remembered clearly the men and women crammed into the small Indian vehicle. Her friends. She remembered their smouldering corpses after the explosion and the way the survivors had suffered, unable to heal fast enough to recover wholly from the nerve damage. That was the only time she had watched her siblings die without just cause on the ground in the wreckage.**

**After that, they had returned to walking and the taking of vehicles being driven on the roads. The Indian was punished for misleading them, the reward returned to their hands, and the motel burned. There was a saying that was most apt when it came to the wrath of the Augments, but Jakarel only remembered a small amount.**

**_Hell hath no fury._**

* * *

She kicked the man again when he seemed liable to sink into shock. Blood was pooling around him rapidly, a sign that his heart was beating at an accelerated pace. She suspected they didn't have much time with him before he faded out on them.

She resolved to make the interrogation fast.

"I asked you a question," she snarled at the human. "Where are we?"

The man grunted his answer between the groans of pain. She was pleased. At least something was getting through the agony.

"Starfleet headquarters, San Francisco," he had said. She didn't understand what a Starfleet was, but she knew of San Francisco. This was where the last stand for the American Augments had been all those years ago. Hallowed ground, now, as her people that had come here had died, every last one of them, and become martyred for their cause, labelled by the humans they had sought to bring peace to as war criminals. America had been the first country to be reclaimed by the humans after the War had been settled. Jakarel remembered vividly that day.

"Why are we here?" She demanded, keeping her voice sharp and piercing. She had to do something to get through the roar of pain in his head. "Why aren't we on the Botany?"

He didn't have an answer and so she kicked him again. His reply came quicker when she repeated the question, a scream of "I don't know" and an "Oh god, somebody help me!"

She slapped him that time, and then she broke his neck.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight: Victory.**

**The sound of gunfire and the screams of humans made Jakarel want to claw out her ears so she wouldn't have to hear them anymore. They prayed for salvation, for heroes to come out of the darkness, for some small semblance of hope that would turn the tide in their favour.**

**The humans didn't realise that the Augments had come to save them. No, they saw them as horrible monstrosities from the laboratories of men that played at god with one another. Flawed, the papers often said before the printing presses eventually ceased to function. The Augments were flawed in vital ways, were malfunctioning, and none could be trusted.**

**The humans just didn't understand, yet, that the Augments were there to _save_ them.**

**Nolanda fell reluctantly and with more losses than anything else had cost them. It seemed a waste to lose so much only to find Singh's compound destroyed by the humans. Loyalists from among the lesser species hunted down the men and women that had destroyed the compound, brought them to face Augment justice, and went home well rewarded for their time. This was what Jakarel appreciated about humanity. Some of them, their finest, understood the cause that drove her species was just and should be welcomed with open arms. If they had any sense at all there would have been no need for so much death and destruction.**

**Humans, though, chose to fight back against the unknown. How did they expect themselves to be led to peace by the Augments while their future saviours were kept on the tight leashes the Doctors placed on them? Jakarel could never understand what difference it made whether they chose to move on the world without human leadership. This was what they had been made for, why couldn't they see that?**

**They found that the humans had taken the Augments of the compound that survived the initial attack and burning of their home and crucified them. Another tribute to the human god. Where were all the atheists? Everybody was religious when they were threatened by an enemy they didn't wholly understand.**

**They saved what they could of those Augments left to die in India's burning sun. They were blessed by the same thing that made them a cursed people. Augmentations saved them the same way they drove them to the extremes of arrogance and ignorance.**

**The city officials and the rebellion they had managed to quell under their vicious onslaught were punished appropriately and pinned the same way they had pinned their captured Augments. Let their god have mercy on them.**

* * *

"Place him in the cryotube," Jakarel ordered. Jakobi was the one to obey, placing the broken body of the human into the recently vacated cryotube of Ivan. Less than a quarter of their number had been revived from their cryogenic slumber and the familiar faces and voices warmed her heart in ways she never spoke about. She was among family, again. There was happiness to be taken from that realisation. Security could be gained, hope could flourish. They could regroup, rethink, and eventually reclaim their territory and assist the world they no longer understood to become something better, stronger.

This time, they didn't hear the security guards coming until the door slid opened and admitted the whole group of them armed with their strange little guns.

The room was ablaze in moments with gunfire, if that's what it could be called, and the smell of singed clothing. Jakarel felt the blast of one of the shots strike her square in the chest, staggering her, before she shook it off and stepped forward. More shots rained down on them, staggering the Augments until they recovered and moved onward. The effects that lingered were akin to the tiny pain of bee stings on their extremities.

Hiltraude was most infuriated when someone struck her with the blast of their gun straight in the face and had her drop to the ground for a few moments before she rose again. Jakarel was angry, as well, when she saw the same thing happen to Maude moments later. Jakobi went down when a shot took him square between the eyes and he didn't get up. She realised moments later that he was dead.

"Set phasers to kill!" Somebody among the humans shouted. There was some universal agreement and a moment of calm clarity before the shots began again and more Augments fell to the blasts. Rage was a heady tonic in the limbs of the survivors when they attacked, utilising every bit of their reflexes to avoid the shots fired to dispatch of the humans. And still, more humans filed in until it was left to three of the Augments among the bodies of their dead and the surrounding humans with their odd guns levelled at the unarmed people.

Jakarel had survived, but barely, having been saved by an Augment when someone fired at her with that killing shot of his. Hiltraude was dead. Jakobi was dead. Maude and Ivan and Solene were dead. The ones who remained, other than Jakarel, were ready to surrender, as reluctantly as they could be, and Jakarel led them to their knees.

She felt like she had failed them.

Khan would have killed her for her weakness.

* * *

**"The world is ours, now." Khan said to his people once the long year of war had finally come to an end with the liberation of Japan. Asia was his, finally, as he had always wanted it to be. Those Augments that ruled under him were there that final day when the war was over. Jakarel was easily overshadowed by them, his governors and generals. She did not mind. Her talents weren't as suited to the war as they were to finding their cure when their leads in India didn't pan out. She had new plans in mind to help in the producing of Augment infants. Those plans didn't exactly have to be known to the general public, however. She was very peculiar about who she let know about the troubles the Augments now faced. It was best to not alarm those that didn't know yet with the news, no matter how they would receive it.**

**"I am proud to call you all my family," Khan was continuing. "You are those people I hold most dear in this world and I am grateful to know each and every one of you the way I do."**

**Kind words, from him, Jakarel mused as she listened. He wasn't known for being so generous with his feelings, not even with her. She half expected him to tell them all he loved them.**

**He didn't. She was fine with that. Some things were too human for them to brandy about lightly. She couldn't even begin to imagine what the response would be to him using those words best associated with the emotive species they finally had under their rule. They were bred to be superior, in all ways the word could be used to define something. Love was an inferior emotion. **

**Sometimes, it felt like the emotion that would best describe the way she felt.**

* * *

They took the survivors away from the others. A sense of loss filled Jakarel's body as she was separated from her people, taken away deep into the building the man had called 'Starfleet'. It felt like a compound, like the one she had grown up in, and she narrowed her eyes as she looked around. Possible routes of escape opened up before her eyes as she was led deeper and deeper. She was grateful, at least, that they left her conscious. She didn't know if there was a purpose to being kept awake and alive and only hoped it meant that the humans wanted something from her that they couldn't get on their own. She suspected they had many different goals in mind, the least of which was acquiring the secrets to her genetic makeup. Silly to consider for they could have drawn the DNA out of her while she slumbered.

Jakarel was taken to what she considered an interrogation room and she glanced around in it, contemplated the layout and the strength of the reinforced glass. Some things never changed. She took comfort in that truth. It told her that humans were as easily anticipated as always. Her smile was smug when the guards left her there in cuffs as though they thought she couldn't break out. She thought differently, though, even though the style of the cuffs was far different than the style of them three hundred years before.

She waited, now, for the one that would come to interrogate her.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine: Waiting.**

**_She could feel their eyes on her as she approached Khan's quarters. There were no more murmurs to follow her, just the steady gazes of those that knew her reasons for approaching their leader._**

**_"Khan," she said as she entered his rooms. She closed the door firmly behind her, locking out the others with the wordless demand that they should not acknowledge what they were about to hear. "Hong Kong is taken."_**

**_Khan was not in the main rooms so she followed the sounds and discovered him in the study. She could see he was working on something. Documents cluttered the desk in neat, orderly stacks that still managed to seem haphazard to her eyes. She slumped down into a vacant chair near the window that overlooked the courtyard and watched him work for a few long moments. His back visibly stiffened under her scrutiny until he placed aside his pen._**

**_"How many survived?" He asked, finally. "Can we reclaim the city?"_**

**_Jakarel sneered. _**

**_"If we want to string every last one of them up, we could take Hong Kong again," she replied. _**

**_"I do not want them to die," Khan said. His voice was even despite the stress underlying the way they interacted. Her gaze hardened but he remained calm. He rose from his seat and began to pace. She was struck by how distasteful the habit was when he did it. He must have seen the disquiet on her face for he ceased his pacing and faced her again, spreading his hands. The gesture was intimidating in its own way, like a challenge. "What's on your mind?"_**

**_"Why are we trying so hard to save them?"Jakarel began. Her voice was sharpened by her disillusionment with the situation they found themselves in. "Do you not realise that they will see us as no more than unnatural creatures invading their freedom? We shouldn't be trying to keep them alive. We should be killing them and teaching them a lesson."_**

**_"We _****are_ teaching them a lesson," Khan said in that deceptively level voice. She could read the tension as he stalked towards her. "Do you have an issue with the way I am leading our people?"_**

**_She had to fight the instinct to rise and challenge him in turn. Her fingers clenched on the armrests of the chair, digging in, as her neck craned to watch him near her. He clasped his fingers around her neck, ran them along the column of her throat, and framed her face between his hands. And then, he compressed._**

**_She gasped as pain flared with the cracking of her jaw between his hands. Reaching up, she clasped her own hands around his wrists, squeezing as well. The action was futile, though. They both knew his wrists would outlast her skull._**

**_"I do not have an issue," she gasped. She wanted to scream at him that he was hurting her, breaking her, cracking her. She had to show her strength, though, that she was worth him. "I only wish to state my disillusionment with our goals, Khan. We are losing, to them."_**

**_She felt like he would kill her if he didn't release her soon, but he did. He relinquished the pressure on her head, his touch more of a caress now, and he drew away his grasp and returned to the desk. She wished he didn't draw away from her._**

**_"Where can we afford to thin our numbers to reclaim Hong Kong?" He asked._**

**_She wanted to scream, again. He couldn't be so unwise as to see the endeavor in Hong Kong was lost. Thinning their numbers further wouldn't make a true victory come any sooner. Other rebels would hear of the uprisings soon. She knew that. Didn't he?_**

**_"I'll see what we can do," Jakarel said after a long moment. Khan nodded and she rose to depart. Her head was ringing._**

* * *

"What is your name?" The man that asked the questions was strange even to the Augment, his voice cold and distant and as unfeeling as the black expanse of space between the stars. Jakarel smiled her condescending smile and maintained her silence, blinking languidly. It was like another game. How long would they refuse to torture her before they eventually broke?

The man stared at her, his face an expressionless mask. Jakarel mused on how easy it had been, once, for her to hold such a level expression.

"What is your name?"

Jakarel quickly began to grow weary of the game when the question was repeated in the man's toneless voice for the next hour. Frustration tinged her voice when she finally deigned to reply, her own concession to her defeat.

"If I tell you, do you promise to not give it out?" She mocked. He was not amused. She sighed in mock sadness. "I'm Jakarel Zenzi," she eventually admitted. The man did not seem pleased with her cooperation. He did not express much at all. If this man was a eugenic specimen of this future world, she looked forward to seeing how other aspects of the society had developed. When the man turned his head as another person entered the room, she noted the angled curve of his ears. Maybe, she realised, he wasn't actually human. She was disappointed.

**Can you hear us?**

Jakarel narrowed her eyes as the new arrival took a seat next to the first man. Her hands clenched against the binding cuffs keeping her hands where they were best watched. She was perversely pleased to hear the voices again, even though hearing voices was hardly a good sign even among her species.

**You have to wake up.**

"Jakarel Zenzi," the new man started, his voice even and distinguished. Jakarel _knew _he was a human by the way he sounded, or at least she fancied she was capable of reading the presence of humanity in the man. The other one, the man who stared so dispassionately, was easily offputting. She strove to ignore him lest his presence completely fluster her and undermine her. "How did you escape your cryotube?"

Jakarel blinked lazily, a slow smile spreading across her face.

"I assumed I was released," she replied, shrugging casually. She could tell the man was not cowed and understood why. He had likely been one of the men to meet Khan when he had been released previously. How she actually knew that wasn't entirely understood, yet. She let it go, though. There wasn't much time to consider something like this.

"Our logs show that nobody was present when you escaped your cryotube," the man began.

"You talk of the cryogenic sleep I was in as though I were a criminal imprisoned in it," Jakarel interrupted. "You are mistaken. I did not escape, I woke up."

"How did you escape your cryotube?" The man ignored her words, or completely disregarded them as obsolete to his investigation.

**Wake up.**

She wondered what the voices had meant. She was already awake, wasn't she? She couldn't understand the reason she heard, again and again, the pleading to wake up. She dug her fingers into the table, frustration growing further and further.

The polite interrogation continued for some time. Jakarel told what she felt the need to share but otherwise remained silent and unkind when she wanted to keep certain facts undisclosed.

* * *

**_The rebellions of the weeks past had finally evolved to that dreaded war Jakarel knew was coming. They lost many cities the more Khan decided to thin out their numbers. She continued to give the order, again and again, that they had to try and reclaim their lost territories. She didn't understand why, though. Why did they have to continue fighting for a lost cause such as this? She wanted to throttle Khan sometimes with how difficult it was to understand his thought process._**

**_She confronted him again during the siege on their fortress in Nolanda. He had taken her arrival much better than he did before. It might have helped that she instigated their meeting by taking his face in her hands and stroking her fingers along his sharp cheekbones and pressing the lightest of kisses to his mouth._**

**_The show of affection was not one she often participated in, but she felt that it suited the moment. While she trusted in his resiliency, she did not have faith in her own. She might be dead in a week._**

**_"What do you want?" He had asked once she drew back from him._**

**_"I want us to return to New Austria," Jakarel replied. She sat on the edge of the desk even as the wall rattled with an explosion. It felt cowardly to be inside while their loyalists and Augments fought for their rule over India, but Khan had to live no matter what and he did not wish for her to go on without him to cover her back. Trust was hard to break. "We are done here, Khan. We have to go on before we all die."_**

**_His anger peaked as she spoke, she could see it in the way his eyes darkened. She reached forward and placed a hand on his cheek as though to reinforce the submission she felt for him. She was not telling him what to do, she wanted him to know that._**

**_Khan was reluctant to admit the truth of her words. She wondered if it was the inbred arrogance that he suffered telling him to fight to the end or if he was just prideful enough to think he still had the chance to save them all as thinned out as they were. Eventually, though, he relented. She was pleased and relieved with that. Enough so to mutter those words that they had let go unspoken for so long._**

* * *

**_They left India in tatters, taking with them what loyalists still clung to their cause that decided to not remain behind and hold down the fort in their absence. Some of them didn't understand the Augments wouldn't be returning until they had regrouped and regenerated some of their numbers._**

**_Jakobi received them well when they made it to New Austria. He had turned his city into the heart of the loyalist and Augment nation. There were riots when the remaining Augments of India returned with the tatters of the Australian Augments and the few surviving Chinese Augments. Reunited under Khan's banner, they were indistinguishable amongst their closest brothers and sisters from those early days in the first campaign._**

**_The call went out summoning others back to New Austria. In retrospect, Jakarel realised she should have been more cautious in having Khan convinced it was best to have them all in one place, but her own advisors had convinced her well enough._**

**_Betrayal was never something the Augments took lightly._**


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note: **So, reading over the last chapter, I realised I totally didn't do what I said I would do when I changed the way I formatted the story. If anybody got confused, I'm really sorry. To the kind person who commented about saying Aboriginals were from Australia and not America, I'm very sorry for the confusion. I'm an Aboriginal woman from Canada, Aboriginal here meaning either of Inuit, Metis, or First Nations descent. I'm First Nations. I know Australia has their own Aboriginals, but up where I live I've heard them called Aborigines. I don't know. It's weird. There are more correct ways to refer to people of aboriginal descent, but I didn't use those descriptors because I felt like the character wouldn't care enough to be politically correct in the human sense of the word. Thank you for the comment, though. As you can see, it got a whole blurb from me.

Again, before I end this really long note, thank you! Thank you for reading, following, favouriting, correcting my errors, and everything you guys have been doing.

* * *

**Chapter Ten: Alone.**

**_In New Austria, Jakarel understood the wordless command she was given by her leader and returned to her research. Every day they lingered they received more news about the humans taking back their cities and killing the Augments if they refused to relinquish their grasp and go into exile. It was strange to her how everything went so wrong, but she threw herself bodily into her work to distract herself from her worries. She saw Khan less and less, so focused on finding a way to replenish their numbers that she emerged rarely from the labs relocated from her former home to Jakobi's own compound. She sought out the solitude of the sterile rooms, the comfort offered by logic she felt she was slowly losing her own grip on._**

**_There were no shortages of volunteers to assist her in finding the 'cure'. Augments came to her when summoned, provided their own knowledge of biological science, and allowed her to test the various methods she had of inducing ovulation. It was impossible, though, and she wasn't sure if it was because her patients were not made to ovulate and bear offspring or if she wasn't doing something right. She was growing frustrated with her work, her patients, and her solitude, but she had no desire to return to Khan's world and watch as their hard won territory chewed itself apart from the inside._**

**_She felt like a coward._**

**_The human volunteers were brought to Jakarel in the middle of the night away from the watchful eyes of their own kind and most of the Augments. She received them all graciously before informing them why they were present. She was going to infuse them with Augment DNA and hopefully find that she could succeed. They were running out of time for other options. News had come that the humans had declared their own war on her kind and were possibly going to come down hard on their last strongholds without mercy._**

**_Her volunteers expressed excitement and worry as they were strapped into the gurneys by other Augments. Jakarel retrieved syringes of the synthesised fluid they would use to attempt to Augment the humans. The serum was based off of their blood, parts found not to be wholly human. The difficulty in acquiring a chemical equation to figure out just what to synthesise, and then the problems with their field test with rats and other small mammals, had made the humans about to be injected with one of Jakarel's most valuable products truly important to her in ways no other humans had ever been, or would ever be._**

**_The injections were delivered, periodically, and then the humans were left to work out the new changes in their own bodies in their own time._**

**_Jakarel would never forget their screaming before they died._**

**_She worked with irritation and impatience driving nails into her skull to find out a way to salvage the experiment that had gone so horribly awry. The humans lay on their tables, dead, in various states of autopsy. So many things had gone wrong with the procedure that Jakarel was seriously considering removing the idea that she could turn a human into an Augment. When she burnt her corpses and the evidence of the procedure, she felt exhaustion rear its ugly head in her for the first time, followed by the curling fingers of anger and frustration and sorrow._**

**_She kicked the wall, hard enough to send a jolt of pain all the way up her leg, and returned to her next project: growing infants the same way she had been grown before being implanted in a human woman. She didn't like the thought of growing children the same way she had been, though. There was a small part of her that wanted to know what it was like to conceive and carry a child naturally and to share that gift with the other women. She didn't think she would see the child as her own otherwise and would not bond adequately to it._**

**_Time passed quickly enough as the days melted into weeks and she worked with her assistants to perfect a way to impregnate the women. They had a few fetuses ready to be planted in their future mothers but the science was still strange for the world and Jakarel feared failure and the consequences this would have on her people. She took the first fetus with the thought that if anything went wrong she would recognise the symptoms and be able to terminate it before it threatened her health. _**

**_And still, they were losing more and more._**

* * *

They had finally stopped asking her questions and had instead deposited her in a cell much like her old quarters in the compound she grew up in. Her cuffs were removed, everything locked down, and then the lights were turned off. She was shrouded in that blackness so often feared by the lesser species and found herself worried in her own way for the sudden loneliness and sense of loss that swept into her heart and settled deep. She hadn't seen her sisters after they were separated before the interrogation and could only expect the curiousity of the humans had made sure their lives were spared.

Jakarel didn't sleep. She had little need to despite the exhaustion she had felt when she awoke. The humans had been injecting her with fluids she didn't know, took samples of her blood and other bodily fluids, and then dumped her here still wired from the injections they had given her. Her heart was beating irregularly, too rapidly to be completely normal, and she was perturbed by the leaps and bounds this society had made during the years she had slumbered. She hated them, these creatures that descended from the same peoples that had created hers, but she wondered if their culture had achieved that peace the Augments had always been intended to enforce upon them. It was strange to hate something so much and still hope they had finally come to their utopia. She supposed it was the conditioning she had received that made her wish things for the humans. There were little emotional connections she had for them either way.

The night went by slow as she paced and waited, anxious for those voices to murmur to her and remind her that she wasn't alone. Little nagging feelings of despair flourished under the unseen moon only to be swallowed and reborn in different forms.

**We are waiting for you.**

She smiled something wicked when she heard the murmur in her ear. In another time with her people she would have feared she was insane, but here and now and alone as she was she trusted her mind to not play cruel tricks on her. The voices had freed her, after all. She knew that however they managed to do that was what the humans wanted to know as well, but so long as they believed she had freed herself they wouldn't lock her back up in her cryotube. They wanted her secrets first.

**You have to open it.**

She dropped down onto her cot and crossed her arms, just listening. Doubts and frustration and anger was swallowed briefly by relief. She was not alone so long as she knew she was being watched out for.

* * *

**_She was screaming as they dragged her out of her laboratory. She was kicking and punching and breaking their frail bones with every blow even as more followed in and grasped her, tried to restrain her, only to continuously fall. Where was Khan? Where was Jakobi? Where were her brothers and sisters?_**

**_She could only see unfamiliar human faces twisted in unfamiliar human expressions. She recognised a few of the expressions in the sea of invaders that had finally broken into New Austria. Hate, anger, seething rage, sorrow... she saw them all and she hated them for it. The stupid creatures that could never, would never, understand her but that fancied themselves her creator and soon, her executioner._**

**_"I want her alive!" Jakarel recognised the voice that boomed out, shuddered with understanding, and began to weep at the betrayal. "You kill her and I'll gut you right here and now!"_**

**_She fought them nonetheless even as the hot tears swept down her face. She wouldn't allow him to have her. She would make them have to kill her or they would all die._**

**_Eventually, there was enough space around her so she could turn and see the humans that surrounded her. Shattered glass, broken bodies, and blood surrounded her. She knew she was hurt, and bad, by the way her whole body throbbed and felt ready to crack and crumble. She turned her head, this way and that, in an attempt to pinpoint where he stood. She found him, finally, smug in his own way that he had managed to get a backing of human followers without them realising he was not a human at all. She remembered hearing the day he had taken some of Khan's people and moved out to Australia, the day his mate died. She remembered hearing his newfound people had fallen to the humans they had tried to dominate. She remembered and seethed deep and hard at the gall he had to walk right into New Austria._**

**_She figured that he had found a way to get the building empty. Khan and Jakobi were likely in the mayor's estate. Her assistants were dead or captured. She was alone and surrounded, outgunned by the humans one of her own brothers had under his fist._**

**_He smiled at her once he had her gaze and she curled her lip in a sneer, stepping forward._**

**_Somebody behind her brought his elbow down onto the base of her skull. The blow sent her stumbling to the ground and was a sign for the humans to get her again._**

**_She closed her eyes and screamed louder than before.  
_**

**_The next blow brought her into the crushing oblivion of unconsciousness. And, all she could think was that she was weak._**


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven: Rip.**

"Jakarel Zenzi," the man said. She looked at him sharply and he smiled slightly when he had succeeded in getting her attention.

"You may call me General Zenzi," she said as he opened his mouth to repeat whatever absurd question he had just asked her. "Since you insist on being formal, that is the title you may use to address me."

"Are you a general, Jakarel?" The man asked. "One of Khan's generals, maybe?"

Jakarel looked away again, finding something in the precise way the room had been constructed so it lacked actual corners to show she didn't care for the game anymore. The man shifted. He was frustrated with her lack of cooperation, she could tell. It amused her to think she was winning the game. As long as the eerily logical man didn't return she knew she could win.

"General Zenzi," the man said finally. He sounded reluctant to address her by any title at all rather than her name. "Answer the question. Were you one of Khan's generals?"

"I _am _one of his generals, yes," Jakarel replied promptly. She did not look away from the speck on the wall. "What is with the use of the past tense, doctor? We both know Khan is still alive and that I still live to serve him."

He looked to his companion, a female scientist, and Jakarel found herself following that glance from the corner of her eye.

Doctor Marla Givers, she thought. The woman had the nerve to introduce herself as though she were Jakarel's equal before the Augment was brought to the second interrogation sequence. She was some sort of psychiatrist. Jakarel didn't care for her.

"Doctor Givers here will be performing some standard tests to show us the limits of your abilities, Jakarel," the man said. He was all business again with addressing her by her given name. "You will cooperate with the assessment."

"One day," Jakarel said, looking at the two humans again, "I will have the opportunity to rip open your stomachs and tear your guts right out of your pathetic little bodies for everything you are going to do to my people." Her voice could never be as intimidating as Khan's. She didn't know if she had managed to cow the man or not, for he soon left, but she could see the woman was unsure of herself now. Jakarel smiled, nice and slow, and moved as though to rise.

"You hurt me and you'll die here, alone," Marla said. "They'll dissect you like the animal you think we are, categorise all your organs and put them into little jars, and then they will figure out what makes you special and use it against your sisters in the other rooms. Then what?"

"If I die, I die to serve them." Jakarel's response was automatic. "Why do humans die for other humans?"

"This isn't a question about why you'll be dying, Miss Zenzi, but of what you would accomplish after you've killed me and then died yourself. How does that serve your people?"

Jakarel remained silent, glaring daggers at the human woman that dared address her as though she were still a girl. She could imagine how she would kill the human using the table and the cuffs they kept her restrained with. She could see how the girl would die, her polite sense of superiority with her, and how her body would be a shield when the humans came in and began to shoot at her with their little 'phasers'.

In another life, she might have liked the woman, but here in this observation room and under the woman's scrutiny; she hated her entirely and would have liked to just rip her apart as she had said.

* * *

**_She recognised where she was when she woke up and her mouth turned up in a crude smile at the thought she was imprisoned in that same hole she had grown up in. For certain it was a mockery that they had left the building standing and the underground in shape even after burning the contents on the aboveground floors. Her room was as bare as it was when she had slept in it although it was a dusty and grimy with the smoke that must have swept through it._**

**_Jakarel was not a nolstalgic woman and so the sight of her former home did nothing to stir her heart in any way but in anger as she sat up. _**

**_He was sitting there smiling at her like that cat in the Wonderland book, grinning in a way that would have made her skin crawl if she were a lesser woman._**

**_"Good morning, Jakarel," he said in the cheeriest voice Jakarel had truly ever heard. She blinked at the sound, finding the pitch irritating, and clenched her hands. She wanted to lunge across the room and tear his lower jaw out of his face but it was the hesitation to harm others like her that kept her still, at least as long as they were alone. She would have no qualms with killing him if he called for anyone to help him with her._**

**_"Aidan, hello," she replied, her voice soft and low and throbbing with the emotions she did not physically express aside from her rage. "I guess you haven't come home to us after all, have you?"_**

**_Aidan's steely gaze glittered with malevolence and she smiled at having already dug in a barb into a wound he hadn't yet healed._**

**_"Do you know why I have you here, Janssen?" Aidan asked, digging his own barb into her in the form of her name. She didn't react but for the increasing anger swelling in her stomach that threatened to explode forth from her._**

**_"You are using me against Khan," she replied. "Or, at least, you are going to try to use me to affect Khan in whatever way the loss of your mate affected you. That is my value."_**

**_"No, actually," Aidan replied. "I've been hearing you carry a child, Jakarel."_**

**_Jakarel tightened her hands, ready to snap now._**

**_"I want that child."_**

* * *

They had her go through their horrible physical and mental exams to compare her functions with the functions of her sisters and Khan, the only Augments they had ever been able to observe in their waking moments. Jakarel enjoyed the excersise but longed to see Aislin and Gertrude again. She suspected the humans to be keeping them separated so they didn't plot, which made sense to her. She would have kept them all separated too if it were her keeping Augments as prisoners.

Marla was there to assess her every day, taking notes on her mental processing and the way she responded to various stimulation. There were other doctors that observed her as well, from men and women to strange beings she had no name for. The sight of these aliens was most interesting to her because during the years of her natural life she had never once believed there was life beyond Earth. How could there be when there was an abundance on Earth already? As far as she understood none of her kind believed in the presence of extraterrestrial life. It was a short sight on their behalf.

She spoke to these creatures more than she spoke to the humans, her innate curiosity getting the better of her as she asked them probing questions to get the bare facts of the many species she saw. She learned that the cold people that could make an Augment frustrated were Vulcans and that their homeworld Vulcan had been destroyed which was what inevitably prompted the humans from Starfleet to seek out weapons and to eventually find the Botany.

Jakarel wished they had just let them drift in their sleep.

"You can talk to me about what is bothering you, Miss Jakarel," Marla was saying to her on one of the days she found herself too dispassionate to train or read, even though the reading material provided was outstanding and provided more than enough information about the new world to understand that space flight, warp engines, and time travel were possible. She was surprised by the care the humans keeping her a captive had provided her with so much to do in her free time. She almost always felt like she was betraying her people whenever she remembered she was living a life none of them ever had, however reluctantly, while they slept unaware of their own danger.

Burgundy eyes rose from the picture the Augment was trying to understand. It was placed back on the table and the tablet it was projected on returned to the home screen once it registered that she was no longer touching it. She looked at the human, disdain colouring her expression.

"You are trying to worm yourself into my affections in the hope that I will display trust in you and therefore confide my secrets and past to you. Stop it. Do not presume that I will be so kind as to tell you to stop the next time you ask me a question, woman." Jakarel's words were biting.

She disliked dealing with Givers, finding the optimism and kindness from the woman to be incredibly frustrating. She trusted the face the doctor presented to her even less than she trusted the hospitality she innately believed to be false and misleading. She had lost too much that she had placed in humans to continue to trust to their feeble words.

Her problem stemmed mainly from the fact that Marla always seemed so _genuine_, like she actually cared. It did not make Jakarel more likely to want to confide in her, though. After all, she wasn't somebody like them.

**Hurry.**

Jakarel looked away from the woman, choosing to ignore the advances Givers attempted as she thought.


	12. Chapter 12

**Author's Note:** So I realised I totally did something stupid and put Marla Givers instead of Marla McGivers as I had intended, which really completely sucks. Anyway, fixed that up here. Additionally, it was harder than I thought it would be to write this chapter. I suppose I've hit writer's block, which is even worse for this story because I had no plan for it when I started it. It took me even longer to figure out whether it should be a flashback or a current story-lined post. Hope you enjoy it, readers.

* * *

**Chapter Twelve: Loss.**

Jakarel began to notice, as days went on, that her captors were ceaselessly attempting, against what she was sure their better judgement, to rehabilitate her. She didn't know what they thought to understand about her by their tutoring and when she asked McGivers one day when she Jakarel was supposed to be studying holotapes of world events from the twenty-first century to the present day. Marla was intrigued by the question, seemingly surprised that the Augment didn't know _why _they were so interested in her and no longer were driven to merely understand her abilities.

"We are trying to understand the differences between us that stop us from being able to coexist in this lifetime," Marla replied. "We want to not have to terminate your species, Miss Jakarel. If there is any possibility of bringing both of our people together instead of warring for any longer, we will gladly accept."

"We have learned all we needed to learn about humans," Jakarel replied. "There are no more lessons about eachother that we must have in order to fully understand eachother."

"You think us lower than you, though. This implies your views are biased and are not wholly accurate."

"I _know _your species is inferior," Jakarel hissed. "Your kind is weak, frail, corruptible, and wholly naive. You are _inferior _in every single way."

"You're wrong," Marla replied.

Jakarel found it difficult to deal with the woman's thick-headed beliefs. She had found it so easy recently to remember how pathetically arrogant the human species was. If she had realised how arrogant and ignorant Marla thought her to be, the Augment might have been angrier than she already was.

She truly missed the interactions she shared with her own kind and longed even for Khan's coldness rather than this human impotency she had to swim through just to make it every day.

They returned to their reading when Jakarel showed an unwillingness to continue the discussion.

* * *

Between studying and being interrogated, Jakarel was often subject to spending more time with Marla McGivers in unscheduled increments because the human woman was enthralled with the history of the Augment species, although her primary focus was on the leaders of the species. Khan was often her favourite to ask about, simply because Khan was the only Augment leader to survive the War. Jakarel played along as best as she could, seeing no reason to withhold information from the very curious woman. If she was fascinated so much with Khan (and Jakarel had the suspicion that the woman was more enthralled by the man than the warrior), she had no right to deceive her.

The questioning was long and tedious but it reaffirmed Jakarel's opinion of her leader and the way their relationship had turned out in the last days of the War before they discovered the Botany and made their final plans.

Marla had wanted to know every detail of Khan that Jakarel herself knew. His eye colour, his hair style, the way his voice sounded, and even how tightly he could grip her when he seized her. Jakarel was made uncomfortable by the knowing look in the human's eyes when Jakarel's voice dipped into the sound of admiration when she told of certain feats Khan had accomplished. She spoke of how Khan had claimed them all as his people and asserted his dominance over those that sought to usurp him. Their loyalty had been admirable, the human responded. Jakarel told her that it was only in their nature.

They dominated what was weak and submitted to what was strong. There was enough in their world that prevented them from maintaining their numbers and infighting was something they knew to avoid at all cost. Especially in the end.

"What I wouldn't do to have been there to see and speak to him," Marla finished the session with a note of sadness. Jakarel latched on to that small hint of melancholy with a sharp glint in the dark red of her eyes.

"Were you not there to meet him when he was awoken, doctor?" She asked. Truly, that did surprise her. Marla was a competent woman and had a certain amount of understanding about the Augments at her disposal, however she might have been overestimating the value the woman held in Starfleet.

Marla's expression said enough.

"What if I promised a chance for you to meet him, face to face?" Jakarel whispered. She drew Marla in closer with the hush of her voice. "What if I can give you a chance to meet this man you admire so much yourself?"

Marla's eyes narrowed with distrust. Jakarel had a plan, obviously, and the doctor knew not to trust in her promises when she had been so harsh so easily. The ease of which the Augment made her plea was also a cause for concern for the doctor. Jakarel had only ever sounded so earnest when it came to her family.

Marla was only human, though, and perhaps her downfall had been preordained by whatever her fate might have been had she lived another life. Jakarel could see the cogs whirling behind her eyes as she thought of the many things it would mean if she had the chance to speak to Khan herself and understand _his _point of view on the era he understood best.

"I'll see what we can do," the doctor said.

* * *

**_They had killed it with their incompetency. Jakarel experienced only a great sense of loss at the knowledge that her attempt to carry an embryo of pure Augment blood had failed, simply because the humans that sought to remove it from her body had done so in a way that ruined her as well as the unborn child that might have come forth from her._**

**_Loss, and then anger, were her first emotions. Her wrath swelled inside of her like a tempest on the sea and the humans sent to attend to her experienced the full effect of her poisonous rage before she ended their lives and awaited more to come._**

**_It was her greatest belief that her life no longer mattered without the use of her womb to carry the children she was made to carry. It was her intention to kill them all, no matter the cost, and even if she were to die herself then at least she would be serving her people by eradicating that one man that had ruined her and would have likely taken the chance to ruin every other woman she implanted._**

**_If her other embryos stored in the lab had not been destroyed before she was taken, Jakarel might not have succumbed to her great anger so easily. She would have looked for something else, for some way to succeed with the other females where she had failed, but it was too late._**

**_The humans were coming and soon there would be nothing left and her despair was like the vast ocean beneath the roiling sea of her anger._**

**_She would kill them all with her bare hands for what they had done._**

* * *

"Come with me," Marla said when Jakarel had emerged from her cell, the Augment alert and wary even at the ungodly hour the doctor had awoken her. She blinked, silent and pondering, and followed the human through the silent compound. In the quiet thoughts that swam through Jakarel's mind, she wondered briefly whether the doctor had lost her mind. Her concern was brief and quickly replaced by anticipation as she recognised the corridor outside of where the cryotubes were being held.

"Khan's access code was changed when he was resealed, but I have it." The human whispered to the Augment as she keyed in the password to enter the holding area. Jakarel wondered about the security but did not ask. Once Khan was awake and she had revived some more of their numbers they would not need to worry about a few humans with their phasers. The Augments were resourceful and strong and would not succumb to a few human men.

They entered and Jakarel shivered at the familiar sound of hissing exhaust and what she imagined was the lingering cold caused by the closeness of those in cryogenic hibernation. She went forward first, followed closely by Marla as the door slid closed behind them.

Faces went by, endless faces of her brothers and sisters in their peaceful rest. Generals and soldiers and advisors. Her love for them lingered like an uncomfortable warmth in her chest where her heart lay. They were dear to her. She could never forget that. And, the woman that sought to use her to speak to her leader would learn the love she felt for her own kind most acutely once Khan was awake.

"Here he is," Jakarel stated in a dispassionate tone. Khan's face was the most serene of those around him although, when she looked at him, she could hear his anger and feel the cold length of his fingers squeezing her throat. She circled around to the opposite side of the cryotube and placed her hand on the glass that separated her from the face of the Augment within. Marla approached the other side and began to key in the code.

The hiss of release was the most satisfying noise Jakarel had ever heard and she allowed herself that one smile of enjoyment before she reached forward and grabbed the hand of the human and pulling her across the cryotube before releasing her arm to seize her by her shirt as the human managed to begin a scream.

"You will live long enough to see this, doctor," the Augment hissed.

She broke the woman's arm with a quick twist at her elbow, the breaking of her fragile bones reminding the Augment of how painfully weak her captors were, before she tossed her aside and moved on to the next cryotube.

She would bring her family back and they would continue where they had left off, finally.

* * *

**Make them bleed.**

**_Jakarel stepped into the hallway, brushing the blood off her hands into the ruined gown her captor had left her in after the procedure. The bodies remaining behind her would be all the signs needed to impress upon the Augment leading the humans that she would not be merciful in her judgement of these people._**

**_As she made her way to the surface, Jakarel knew what she would do when she emerged, rather than destroy the compound once and for all. No, she would find Khan, gather their forces, and urge them to leave. There was nothing left for them here. She didn't know where they could go, but there was bound to be somewhere they could wait until the day the world was ready for them._**

**_And if there wasn't, then she would lead them as they burned the world down._**


	13. Chapter 13

**Author's Note: **So, I think once I'm done this I might make another Khan story. Don't know yet. Anyway, this likely won't be done for a while.

* * *

**Chapter Thirteen: Emergence.**

Khan emerged quicker than Jakarel had when she first awoke, alert sooner than she anticipated as she was releasing the last of them. She heard him exhale loudly and turned her head from where she worked, several rows away and smirked.

"Take a look, Marla. Your opportunity has come. Take advantage of it while you can."

She could hear the doctor sobbing as she cradled her arm where Jakarel had left her. The sounds disturbed Jakarel but she didn't say anything, instead removing herself from the cryotube she had been figuring out the code for in order to tend to Khan, not that he needed it. The others waking up were in various states of awareness and suffering as she had when she awoke. She hoped they would be capable of defending themselves adequately soon.

"Khan," the Augment said quietly as the male pulled himself from his cryotube. He wore the clothing of Starfleet, she noted. "Welcome back."

He reached for her and she lowered herself into a position of submission out of instinct, allowing his hand to stroke along her jaw with a tenderness he didn't often display. She could see in his eyes that there had been despair and sorrow and wrath but as he touched her and she leaned into his hand, something in him warmed and cracked and _celebrated._

"I thought you all dead." Khan's words were quiet, a murmur of unspoken doubts and confusion that must have been wearing on the hard shell of armour conditioned to clasp over his heart and mind.

"We are still here," Jakarel responded, her words as soft as his. "Forever."

Khan released her and she straightened. They were all business again, that strange softness replaced by their cold logic and sharp intelligence.

"How many are awake?" Khan asked his general.

"Twenty-two, Khan," she replied. "We lost eleven to the humans when we awoke. The rest are still in cryo."

Khan turned his head to look at her, the strange eyes burning an unspoken promise into her that she knew he would gladly make true. He _knew_ she had cost them eleven lives. He knew it and it angered him. She could only be glad that he didn't try to kill her now.

"Wake the rest."

"Gladly," Jakarel nodded and left, trying to not look like she was fleeing. As she passed Marla, she stopped and faced Khan. "This human brought me to you in exchange for the opportunity to meet you. I felt it adequate compensation if I gave her the chance to do so before she died. Khan, she is a great fan of yours."

She cast one last look down at the whimpering human as Khan turned to see her, as though he only now realised she was there.

"You're welcome, doctor McGivers," Jakarel said lastly before she returned to where she had left off, giving orders to rising Augments as she went to arm themselves with whatever they could and to cover the entrances.

* * *

As Khan approached her, Marla recoiled. Her fear outweighed the pain of her broken arm as she used the useless limb to brace herself against a vacated cryotube. Khan looked down at her, watched her feeble attempts to escape, and then reached down and seized her by her throat to lift her to standing before shoving her against the cryotube. She slumped against it when he released her, fresh tears running down her face.

"What is your name?" The Augment demanded of the human. She shook her head and he raised a hand to clasp his fingers around her lower jaw, tightly. Jakarel could see, from where she stood, that the human was attempting to resist the man's attempts to assert his dominance over her. Her ears could hear their words when the human plead for him to stop and he whispered his question for her to hear again.

**You should kill her.**

Jakarel looked away and opened the cryotube.

"What is your name?" Khan repeated the question, enunciating clearly.

"Marla McGivers," the doctor whispered. "Please, don't hurt me."

"Begging for your life is hardly an endearing trait in Starfleet lieutenants, Marla," Khan replied. Marla seemed surprise at his knowledge of her rank before she remembered that he was also one of them, if even as part of a lie, and would recognise the sign of her rank on the cuffs of her uniform dress. "My general says you are interested in _me._ Explain." His tone suggested he was uninterested in _her_ despite the trouble she must have gone through to get him out of his cryotube. "My general said you wanted to meet me, so here I am. A fitting exchange, don't you think?"

"Khan, they are coming."

Khan smiled slowly and turned away from the human to look towards the Augment that had spoken who was listening at the door. Jakarel was finishing with another cryotube and once done she reached one of the vacant ones and tore off a piece of the metal sheeting to use as a shield, or makeshift weapon, before she joined Khan.

"You didn't eliminate the security," Khan said to Jakarel. He didn't need to look at her to know she was there.

"I did not see it as prudent." Jakarel's reply was level.

"We will discuss the definition of prudence later, Jakarel," Khan promised.

* * *

Their escape was a hurried, unplanned thing and succeeded with the cost of sacrifice and pain. Marla was their hostage as they made their way to freedom at the heels of their leader, clasped in Khan's long-fingered grasp and managing to hold back her tears and wails. They knew they were being monitored now, although the pursuing guards were reluctant to come against them after they had effectively crippled the brunt of their force.

It was a prominent thought in all their minds that they had to escape quickly or be captured and, most likely, executed.

"Where are we, doctor?" Khan growled at the woman in his grasp. She shook her head, pressing her lips tightly together, and Khan dug his fingers tightly into her arms, making her cry out. "How much farther need we go?"

"Two more levels up!" Marla cried out.

"Not so difficult, was it?" Jakarel said from where she was positioned behind Khan. Khan turned his head to glance at her, a smirk turning his lips. She smiled back before they continued on, Khan forcing the human to direct them to their freedom under the threat of pain.

There was lightness in their step that would have been invisible to the humans, a relief in the set of their shoulders as they walked, side by side and behind and before their family. They were together, at last, and the new world they would be emerging from would soon know it.

* * *

**_Aidan was fierce, violent, and merciless. Jakarel was not the same, no matter how much she wished she was. She was possessive, vicious, and savage in her own way. The male was aggressive and she was not, at least not in the same way that he was._**

**_She had not hurt so much, and to feel the pain under Aidan's hand only worsened it, as though the betrayal from another member of her species amplified the agony._**

**_She had never fought so hard as she did against him._**

**_Kicking, punching, and even savage biting._**

**_But he was stronger, always stronger, and she could only make up for it by avoiding him as best as she could and striking his blind side. He hit harder, every time, and his unkempt savagery wounded her more than her restrained savagery wounded him._**

**_She knew she was doing it wrong, but she didn't care._**

**_Khan was coming. She knew it.  
_**

**_He had her by her throat against the wall. He was squeezing his fingers tightly around her throat and she was failing, horribly failing, at breaking the arm attached to that murderous hand._**

**_The darkness was covering her eyes and she was amused by it, by her death. She felt the alarming weakening of her limbs and the slowing of her pulse against his hand. There was no peace in dying, though, and even as her life fled her she could only feel anger beneath the amusement, thrumming in beat with the laborious pumping of her heart. She slumped, unable to keep up the fighting, and her hands lay limp along Aidan's bloody forearm._**

**_She was dropped without warning and pain lanced across her midsection as the fall hurt her wounds from the surgery that removed the fetus from her. She didn't cry out, though, and could manage only manage to curl up somewhat and weakly growl._**

**_"That wasn't so difficult, was it?"_**

**_The drawl preceded the tell-tale sound of a neck breaking and a body falling. Jakarel's bleary eyes noted the approaching shoes of the man that spoke, the voice unfamiliar in the oxygen-deprived state of mind she lay in. Slender fingers attached to an elegant hand extended into her vision and seized her limp wrists, pulling her upright with a delicacy she was unfamiliar to._**

**_"Are you weak?" The man asked as Jakarel swayed, catching her breath and closing her eyes. Her heart was pounding furiously now, challenging her lungs for oxygen._**

**_"I am fine, Khan," Jakarel replied. Automatically, she spoke with a tone of dismissal. She opened her eyes and found those strange eyes focused entirely on her. The gold was dizzying, she noted, and the colour was entirely absent in the eyes of the rest of them. Her mind mused over the fact the Augments had such vivid eyes while she tried to regain lucidity. Was she really that weak?_**

**_"How did you find me?" She asked the male once she had regained some semblance of control over her mouth and mind. She didn't have to look to know Aidan was surely dead, now. She had heard it. _**

**_"Where else would you go?" Khan said. He took her arm, his grip a quiet support that she was utterly grateful for, and led her out. His patience with her slow pace and her need to stop and breathe every so often while she held her stomach was appreciated. He wasn't always so tolerant._**

* * *

"When we exit, do not be alarmed by the face our world now wears," Khan's voice was a smooth murmur loud enough for every Augment that accompanied them. The dark tone, although rich, seemed to unsettle the human that he had maintained a merciless grip on. "We will likely be assaulted. Do note that the people we will meet will all see us as an enemy and will try to capture us, or kill us if they do not succeed in adequately containing us. Do not hesitate. Do not show mercy."

His Augments, the remaining dregs of their society and species as a whole, were silent. The anticipation was a thrum of energy beneath the silence, regularly punctured by Marla's protests and complaints at the pain.

"Are we to take the human with us, Khan?" Aislin, who had been recovered with assistance from the reluctant doctor, eyed the woman with a predatory glint to her eye. Jakarel smiled but did not look back. "I can think of a thousand and one replacements that would be more suitable than her."

"We are taking her with us," Khan said. Aislin opened her mouth to reply.

"Do not argue the point, Aislin," Jakarel said, interrupting the woman. "Sometimes, even the best of us need a pet."

Khan's amusement tinged the thrum of anticipation almost visibly.

* * *

The sunlight blinded the sensitive Augment eyes that had grown accustom to the darkness of cryogenic hibernation and artificial lighting. Khan was the only one that did not flinch. He knew what to expect. They should have realised it and come to expect it as well, but their excitement made them reckless.

And, when they emerged from the compound, they were immediately under attack.


	14. Chapter 14

**Author's Note: **I might have actually written myself into quite a pickle, here. I don't know where I'm going with this, still. I should think about brainstorming before the chapter fifteen or something! I guess I'm keeping Marla alive for reasons that have nothing to do with Into Darkness, or Into Darkest Darkness, and everything to do with Space Seed and Wrath of Khan. If the woman can get his attention in the prime universe, I stand firmly in the belief that something about her still gets his attention in this universe. But, that's just faulty author's logic and should entirely not be taken seriously. I don't even know how... Actually, this is for my brainstorming. Let's hope I do you guys proud with this one, eh?

* * *

**Chapter Fourteen: Agreement.**

They were trapped. Already. Cornered like rodents in a cage with nowhere to go. They were surrounded by humans both from within the building and outside. Starfleet, it seemed, had learned that they couldn't contain the Augments with a mere handful of security. Jakarel detested this feeling of being trapped. She had been inside this building long enough and now desired the freedom just beyond the door.

She could only be grateful that the humans were hesitant to fire upon them, perhaps in the hopes that they could still talk the Augments into releasing the prisoner and to go back into their tubes. Jakarel thought that it was their reluctance to fire upon them while they had one of their own in their hands that had them stopping. Marla truly did serve a purpose.

"What are we going to do to get out of this, Khan?" Jakarel could hear Llarana hiss the question at their leader. She was covering the door they had escaped from with a few of the others, armed with their pieces of cryotube, and so she didn't see the dour look Khan must have shot Llarana with. He did not like to be questioned, not even by them. Not unless they approached him right.

"Let me go and talk to them!" Marla gasped out. That she could still talk was a surprise to Jakarel. She had done nothing besides whimper and whine this whole time. "I can save you!"

It sounded, to Jakarel, that the human meant that she could save only _Khan_. She clenched her fingers into the piece of metal she gripped and tried to envision a scenario where she had _not _brought the pathetic woman along with them in the first place. Maybe she should have killed her in the holding area instead of breaking her arm and letting her have some time to talk to Khan.

"What makes you believe that we need _your_ help, pet?" Jakarel hissed, unable to stop herself. She turned her head to glare at the woman, her family moving aside to allow her the clear line of site. Possessiveness was a trait a good many of them had and they understood it. Even Khan understood.

"You are one of the people that kept us here, and despite the fact that you are not yet dead, that status can be changed at any moment. Do you understand, Marla?" Jakarel had thought the woman superior to her peers that evaluated her and tried to rehabilitate her, but that opinion was tempered by her hate of the human species as a whole and her disgust at how weak they had kept themselves despite their leaps in technology.

Marla tightened her mouth and Jakarel looked away.

"I will not be allowing you out of our sight just yet, Doctor," Khan said to the woman once he was certain that nobody else would interrupt. "Talk to them from here, let them know that despite their misleading attempt to convince me I had lost my family, I have them here now and only wish to continue what we were doing before our exile."

"We don't need you to enforce peace on us anymore," Marla interrupted. "We don't need _your_ help, Augment!"

Khan dug his fingers into her arm. Her scream was sharper than the others she had released before. It sounded like he was breaking her arm again and again rather than manipulating the injury to bring pain to her again. He released her and she gasped for breath. Jakarel could imagine the tears streaking her face.

"There is more to us than you think, woman," the man growled. Jakarel missed the words with the hush of his voice. They were for Marla alone. "I only want my family, safe, and I'll even make a deal with your Starfleet."

"They will never trust you. Not after what you did to Starfleet Headquarters, or to the Archives in London. You are a murderer and nobody will expect anything but for you to betray them. Let _me _decide what to say." Jakarel could hear her words and she pondered over them. From what she had been told of Khan's actions before he was resealed she understood that he had destroyed much in his desire for vengeance. She could not judge him harshly for that. They were all capable of destruction, and in that regard they were gods.

"Trust is subjective. You _will _tell them what I want you to say," Khan turned the human to press her back against the wall. Jakarel turned to watch, curiosity at the way he would enforce his will into the woman pulling her away from her duty. He had a hand pinning the pale throat of the doctor and she watched him out of fearful, yet resolute, eyes. Suddenly, the doctor focused those eyes on Jakarel and her working arm crossed across her chest as though to protect it. Khan followed her gaze and met Jakarel's eyes. They stared at eachother for a few long moments, Khan and Jakarel, until Jakarel tapped a nearby Augment and passed over her sheet of metal. She approached the Khan then, feeling as though he were summoning her. He looked at the doctor again and pressed his hand tighter into her throat. She gasped and looked at him. "We are running out of time, Doctor. I am losing my patience with you. If you do not do as I say, I will kill you."

The doctor took the threat to heart that time. Khan gestured to Jakarel, bringing her closer. When she was in reach he lifted his free hand and drew it along her cheek. Marla watched the progress. Jakarel returned the gesture, keeping her eyes on the doctor. There was something satisfying in asserting possession in front of a subjugated woman.

"I thought we were going to go out and attack," somebody complained from the rear. There was a murmur and the voice was silent. Khan and Jakarel only considered the human woman before them, their unblinking stares unsettling her.

"I want you to take her, Jakarel," Khan said eventually. "You know what to do should she _fail _us."

"You wouldn't need to remind me," Jakarel responded. "Do you know what to do should she fail?"

"You won't need to worry about that." He smiled, his mouth turning up cruelly, and Jakarel nodded. He released the woman and Jakarel seized her immediately, drawing the slightly taller woman close and pushing her to stand before her, troubled by the idea of managing a hostage situation.

She had never done well with them before, and her trust in Khan faltered briefly before she resolved her doubts with remembering that he had never led her, or their people, astray before. Even their losses during the war weren't his fault. No, it was her fault. That had been made clear, already.

She gripped the woman tightly, inhaled deeply, and marched forth to the door, shoving the woman when she faltered. Her heart pounded furiously in her chest and adrenaline sung through her veins.

* * *

"Release the woman and surrender immediately."

The first words that Jakarel heard upon exiting whatever Starfleet building she had been kept in did not bode well. She smiled, though, and the anticipatory arch of her lips was predatory. She knew the humans believed her kind to be the monsters of the past, the decidedly evil tyrants and murderous maniacs. She knew it and did not see fit to remove the illusion. The humans suited Jakarel's perception of their species as well and she would not allow them to see her as anything other than dangerous, for they might have thoughts to use her to their advantage or to dominate her.

The weak could not dominate the strong and to remind them of this she dug her fingers into Marla's neck and drew forth a pained cry.

"Shall we try that again?" Jakarel called to the men and women that lined the other side of the sidewalk.

She could see their weapons aimed at her, and at the doctor, and pondered the use in coming out to speak.

"Release the-" the one that had spoken attempted to do so again. He was interrupted by another pained cry from the doctor.

"When I said 'shall we try that again', I did not mean for you to _repeat _yourself," Jakarel's voice had a dark tint to it. "I have brought this woman here to address you and I do not wish to hear what you have to say on the matter. Now, doctor, you may speak." _And remember that I will kill you if you do not do as we intended for you to do._

The doctor seemed to hear the unspoken warning and nodded. Jakarel smiled thinly and kept her eyes on the nearest of the armed men, a strange creature with overlarge eyes and skin the colour of light chocolate.

"Khan Noonien Singh," the woman began, startling Jakarel with her knowledge of Khan's full name, "would like you to know that, now that he has his family, there is no need to continue this quarrel. His demands are to be met, with haste, or he will not hesitate to kill every single one of you."

Jakarel had to admit that he woman had managed to capture what Khan's demands would have been like if it had been him stating them. She was very intelligent, the Augment noted. Her hand tightened around her throat reflexively.

"We all know that he can't just be allowed to walk free after what he did," the man that had first addressed them said. "And why isn't he here, now? Is he too much of a coward? Is he hiding behind that door, unable to face the consequences of his actions?"

"Why should a god deign to speak with an ant?" Jakarel responded, unable to allow the human to insult her leader. "You can deal with me, can't you? I might not be as notorious as the one I stand here for, but I am not to be taken lightly nonetheless."

"You certainly do make an impression with your tone alone, girl," the man said. "Let Khan know this: if he wants his people to be free so badly, then he should surrender himself now and allow the rest of your kind to be placed back into your hibernation until we've figured out where to let you out."

"We do not accept." Jakarel hissed the words out as soon as she worked out the implications in her quick mind. She tightened her hand further against the neck of the doctor until the woman yelped and began to buckle, an evasive attempt to escape the hand that held her. "If you do not make another offer, one worthy of my leader, I will kill this woman right here and now and return to that building, and then you will have your opportunity to see Khan when he is standing before you tearing apart your body as though you were paper. Do you understand?"

She took the silence as agreement and released the woman somewhat, allowing her to catch her breath while jerking her to standing fully again. She would not allow the woman to not shield her. Softly, the human was encouraged to _try again._

* * *

Retreating back into the building was something of a challenge, for with every step that Jakarel took with her hostage the armed men and woman took a step of their own. Their behaviour unsettled her for it had been uncommon for humans in her day to so brazenly face an Augment. It troubled her that she might have underestimated this species. She did not want to make a mistake.

Once the door opened, she was dragged in by the strong hands of her brothers and sisters. Marla was taken away from her and Jakarel allowed her to be consumed in that mass of bodies. She could see, as she was pushed and pulled through her only loved ones, that they seemed to have staged some sort of coup against the guards at their rear. They were armed, now, and one of the phasers was pressed into her hand before she was presented to Khan.

"What do they say?" Khan's question came immediately as he looked at her. He took her hands in his and righted the phaser so she clutched it like a gun. He armed it and the gentle whirring that symbolised it was powering up charged her nerves with anticipation. "It's set to kill, but so will theirs. Do try to not get hit."

Jakarel nodded at his advice. "They have decided to consider the best way to fulfill your terms, Khan. I must admit, Marla did well in convincing them to play along."

Marla was pressed upon them then as though just mentioning her had managed to summon her. Khan caught her and turned her to present her to Jakarel. Smiling, Jakarel brought her unarmed fist into the woman's stomach. She doubled over in pain and Khan released her to allow her to writhe in the torment and aggravate her arm and other, accumulating, injuries.

"I'm certain that you believe my assault was uncalled for, Marla, but I do feel the need to remind you that there is no love between us and you are not an equal." Jakarel lowered herself to address the human, reaching forward to take her chin in hand. "And if I had the chance, I would make it so that you never saw the sun again."

"Kill me, then," Marla grunted, the pain clogging her voice. "Kill me and stop threatening me. Or, are Augments so reliant on their words that they have forgotten what it is that made them so _great_ all those years ago?"

Khan chuckled and reached down to capture Jakarel's arm before she swung at the woman in response.

"You chose the most interesting human to bring along, didn't you?" He asked his general as she rose.

"I'm beginning to regret it," Jakarel replied.

Khan turned his head to look at her, his frigid eyes meeting the burning pool of red that her eyes embodied. "I don't," he said.


	15. Chapter 15

**Author's Note: **To be honest, I might put Saavik in my next Into Darkness story. It won't be a Saavik/Khan thing, though. I don't think I'll give Khan a romantic interest. Hmmm. Brainstorming for the next story before this one is even over doesn't bode well, eh?

I don't think I made it clear what I had in mind when I said this was a Khan/OC story, because I didn't specify the OC. I don't think I will, either, because I have a canon character at my disposal and a truly original character to compete with her. I would like to read what you guys, my readers, think should happen with this pairing. Do you think it should be Khan/Marla or Khan/Jakarel, and why? I'm curious and would love to read your thoughts (although they won't really effect the outcome in the end).

* * *

**Chapter Fifteen: Savage.**

"Why are you doing this?" Marla's voice was a low murmur beneath the quiet conversations of the Augments. Jakarel looked up at the doctor from where she sat nearby, focusing the deep burgundy of her eyes on the pale face of the human. Khan was elsewhere, speaking with the other generals, and had left the human in Jakarel's care. Neither of the women were too excited by the prospect, for entirely different reasons.

"You know why. We want freedom." Jakarel responded with utter conviction, quickly and firmly, and continued to stare at the woman.

"No, I mean why are you keeping me here? Why do you insist on continuing the work you left unfinished centuries ago?" Marla had begun to speak quickly. Her faced paled further as though speaking had cost her a lot of energy. Jakarel observed this with cold intensity.

"We require you," Jakarel tilted her head at the human. "If you think to confuse yourself with someone that matters, I think you should know that you are the means to an end and nothing else. "And, it is amusing that you should ask me _why._ You know what we were made to do. It isn't by my desire that we would seek to reinforce our control over your kind. If I had my way, I might have you all killed." Jakarel had hissed out the final sentence, spitting it like a threat and a promise. Marla recoiled but the burning in her eyes did not recede.

"Why do you hate us? Were you also conditioned to loathe us so much?"

"You are inferior. You would never understand."

"You think I am an inferior being because I am human? What is it that makes you different from me if you had not the increased strength and intelligence that _my people _instilled into you while you were still undeveloped fetuses? You would be no different from me."

"I will always be superior and you will _always_ be inferior. Even without my augmentations you would be like an ant on the ground and I would still be the boot that would crush you. I do not suffer the pull of sentiment and emotion that you suffer. I do not feel mercy, or regret, or doubt as you know it. I desire and I fulfill and between them both, I am action and savagery. You, a human, are meant to be dominated and subjugated. I live to bring you to peace and once, I succeeded. All you need to do is look in your history to see why it is that I _hate _you." Jakarel had come even closer to the human, almost face to face, but the human did not try to back away. She held her ground. Jakarel wondered if it was the lack of pain that made her so bold, although the broken arm must not have felt pleasant nonetheless.

"Hatred is an emotion. A pretty powerful one, at that." The doctor murmured the words, not needing to speak up for the Augment to hear her. "Do you also feel love? Perhaps for Khan? For your family? Or would you kill any one of them without a single regret?"

Jakarel raised her hand, ready to snap it across the face of the woman.

"Jakarel," Khan's voice was loud, warning her, and she clenched her hand into a fist before lowering it. There was silence now. The others were watching Jakarel as she retreated from the woman and stood. They watched her approach their leader, the tension in her body bringing forth a tide of new murmurs as they wondered, almost as one, what the human had said that would have instilled a physical response.

Once she reached him, Khan raised a hand and drew it across her jaw in a motion she often associated as dominating, but as he completed the action now she couldn't help but wonder exactly what he meant the action as. She raised a hand and traced the perfect shape of his mouth before lowing it so her fingers curled gently at his neck and felt the pulse of his heart. Humour coloured his strange eyes as he smiled.

"Did the doctor insinuate something you didn't want to admit to, Jakarel?" His voice was a soft purr when he reached down to capture one of her hands, his long and elegant fingers smoothing along her palm and across her wrist to feel the rapid pace of her heart. The thinness of her wrist brought a frown to his face. He had not realised immediately that she had lost weight during her time with the humans. He looked at Aislin and Gertrude and noticed that they too were thinner than he liked his people to be. "Have they not been feeding you?"

"I did not want to give them the pleasure of watching an Augment eat," Jakarel responded.

Khan smiled, amused. "I wonder if it was embarrassment for how much you might have eaten had you accepted their food that kept you from giving them that pleasure."

Jakarel couldn't resist the smile that curved her mouth. He raised his other hand to trace the shape of her lips. The tenderness chilled her suddenly and her smile died.

"You are more human than you think," Marla's voice cut through the moment, drawing the eyes of every single Augment. Jakarel tensed again and more than a few of her brothers and sisters half rose to go to the human. "You just need to admit it."

Khan was staring at her when Jakarel looked at him again. The amusement was gone. The tenderness had faded away. They were cold again.

"Fix her arm," the leader said.

"With pleasure," the general replied.

* * *

They did not sleep through the night with the knowledge that the humans were likely plotting their demise. Couples departed every so often to satisfy the urges that had returned with their awakening. More than once did Jakarel look at Khan and consider taking him elsewhere so she might satisfy her desire for him, but she did not act on it. She could still feel his tenderness, his care, and she did not want their coupling to be marred by that instance of humanity.

She had known Marla was right about their emotions but she couldn't admit it herself. She did not want to be anything like those creatures she detested, the inferior rodents that she had come to hate so strongly in so short of a time. She didn't want to admit that they were, by their very design, human, while maintaining her conviction that they were gods at the same time.

She had enjoyed realigning the bones in the woman's arm and the gratification her cries of pain had brought her. She was allowed a transfusion of blood, offered by Jakarel herself, and the healing process was quick. The doctor expressed wonder at the effects of the Augment blood.

"Thank you, Miss Zenzi," she had whispered as she flexed her hand and moved her arm.

For a long moment, Jakarel had considered her before she nodded and left.

"You don't have to be ashamed of being human, you know," Marla stopped her in her tracks with those words. Jakarel tensed again. The human put her on edge far too easily. She longed to kill her, but for now she served some use.

"You wouldn't understand why I have to be, even if I explained it to you," Jakarel responded. She was unsettled by the human's very own conviction.

Even now, as she watched the human, she could see her trying to convince the others that they didn't have to hate humans, that they weren't superior, that there could be _peace_.

Some of them listened closely, considering her words. Others scorned her and her ideals and insisted, when they had the chance, that humans were soulless and basic and Augments were the future, and always would this be the truth of it.

"Do you even understand the concept of the soul?" Marla had demanded of them when they had said their piece. "Do you understand peace and freedom and equality? We have that _now_. We achieved that ourselves, without your people enforcing it upon us."

They allowed the human to debate with them. Even Jakarel, who said nothing through the exchanges, was listening. She could see the calculating glimmer in the eyes of that man she was beginning to consider her lover, her love, and she smiled thinly at what he might be planning. She could see he was impressed with the human. She could read the enraptured poise with which he held himself as he leaned forward from where they sat. They had been talking before the human insisted on changing the ways the Augments viewed themselves and their world, but their discussion had died.

Jakarel found hatred glimmering in her heart again, burning at the thin veil she used to conceal her emotions. First, Marla's kind had stolen from her the chance of bringing a future for the Augments, and now the doctor was drawing Khan further and further into her web of doubts and insinuations. Jakarel couldn't stand the thought that a human was competing with her for something. She wanted to squeeze the woman, crush her, break her into tiny pieces and then burn her. Her hands tightened and Khan noticed. Whether he realised the cause of her frustration or not, he still placed a long hand on top of her smaller one and curled his fingers around hers.

"Do you even understand the concept of love?" Marla was demanding of her audience.

As Jakarel clutched the hand of her mate and rest her head against his shoulder, she believed that she did understand.

And she fell asleep.

* * *

The day came quickly then and sooner than she would have wanted, Khan was rising and pulling her along with him. She was awake almost immediately, but lightheaded. Now she cursed her stubborn decision to ignore the food offered to her. Augments had a horribly quick metabolism and they needed every bit of energy they could gather to function at their highest.

Khan noticed the weakness in her limbs when she relied on him to right herself. His concern was tempered by something she didn't want to see, not in front of the others, and she lowered her head in deference to wordlessly remind him that he was the dominant one and should not show weakness that would earn him a challenger. She was the submissive one. She could afford to be weak. She was always weak. Khan looked away from her, ordered the doctor to be awoken.

They were ready then for what the day would bring. As she looked at the faces of her brothers and sisters and mate, her heart throbbed with longing for them. She only wanted them to be safe. She needed them to find that peace that they had been designed to achieve.

She wondered if they would all have to die for that desire to be realised.


	16. Chapter 16

**Author's Note: **A few chapters back I was working on a beta form of what the chapter was going to entail. In it, Marla had convinced Jakarel to let the Vulcan mind meld with her in exchange for being able to visit Aislin and Gertrude. Because she hadn't explained what a mind meld entailed, Jakarel found the action deceitful and crude and attacked them both, rendering the Vulcan unconscious and beating Marla savagely for trying to have her hurt.

It didn't actually happen that way in the current form, but it kind of amused me as I thought about that today. Even funnier is that, once she had finished beating Marla, she sat back down in her chair, placed her hands on the table, and allowed the security to restrain, and detain, her _calmly._

I can't even explain why it was I made the chapter like that originally, but I am pleased I did not keep it in and instead worked it somewhat differently.

The violence can come later.

Also, want to know what's really awesome? I've already written the end. Everything else is just the means.

* * *

**Chapter Sixteen: Letting on.**

The sunlight was harsh on their eyes as they emerged, although they refused to flinch. Marla shielded her gaze immediately and stared.

The humans facing the Augments were unarmed, at least visibly, and in a show of faith they had not come in as great a number as they had the day before. Shrewd eyes calculated them, observed the nuances of their bodies, and discerned no ready threat.

Jakarel did not trust them. Her hatred of humans went far too deep for her to overlook just this once. Wisely, it was Khan who spoke this time as the Augments handled the unfamiliar weapons into the familiar way they had once clasped the firearms of their time. Marla was grasped tightly in Aislin's hands this time. Jakarel was glad. She was still uneasy around the female, and Marla knew that her words unsettled the Augment, that her words challenged the perception Jakarel had fostered since her developmental years as a Janssen.

"Have you come to terms with our conditions?" Khan's voice was authorative when dealing with the humans. Demanding. Arrogant. He did not ask if they had their own terms to negotiate. He did not ask a name and nor was one offered. This was a negotiation and nothing else.

"Not yet, Khan," the leader said. He had authority as well. Enough to challenge Khan for domination? Jakarel doubted it. "There is the matter of the millions you killed when you brought down half of San Francisco."

Khan's blue-green-gold eyes were observant as he surveyed the man that spoke for the humans. Jakarel was looking at Marla, who had tensed. Knowledge of the casualties of the last time Khan was revived had been shared long enough ago that it was somewhat old news, although it seemed the old wound was still fresh for the humans.

"All I want is the safety of my people," Khan eventually said. His voice was level, sincere, but the curl of his lips was mocking. "I will do nothing unless you ensure that they are never taken from me again."

Jakarel shuddered, chilled. Did he not intend to fight for their freedom? Was this to be a verbal war, then? What about their lifelong goal of bringing lasting peace to the world? Was he giving up on them?

Doubts nagged at her.

**Patience.**

The voices returned. Murmurs in the hushed tones of the dead brothers and sisters. Jakobi and Hilda and Aidan and Ansem and Anohki and Pietr...

Jakarel's fingers tightened on the phaser. It hummed as it powered up beneath her hand. Did she imagine the whine that it emitted? The sidelong look that Khan cast at her? The tension in the bodies of her brothers and sisters?

**Do not mind them. Mind only the humans.**

Jakobi's was a comforting voice as it whispered into her ear. She wanted to believe he was there, next to her. He was like her; he was cold to the humans, unfeeling when he had to deal with them, and hated them as fiercely as she did. He had taken the injections before their departure in the Botany, same as she, the same as the few others. She longed for the unchanging presence of Jakobi, who had lost his mate to the fire that made the last dregs of the Augment society homeless. He had lost her to the humans. His reasons to hate the humans were as strong as hers, and had as noble a cause.

**You have to wake up.**

There it was again. The insistence. She was already awake, she wanted to scream.

"Jakarel?" Aislin's mutter was low enough for few Augments to hear. Aislin had taken the injections as well. Her voice was not present in Jakarel's head, ringing incessantly for her to _wake up, wake up now._

"Proceed," Jakarel said, shaking her head subtly to show she was unwilling to discuss the matter.

She wondered if she was going mad, but discounted the notion.

She was an Augment. Madness was not a condition they could suffer.

She refused to suffer it.

"We never had any intention of harming your people," the man said. "Our goals were to see if there was a way to make peace between the human race and the Augment species. We offer rehabilitation, tutoring, equality. In exchange, we want you to uphold the vow you swore to Starfleet. We want you as one of us, Khan. We want all of you."

"Super soldiers in your army?" Khan sounded slightly surprised. "That sounds a lot like something I heard once, a long time ago."

"We are not Noonien Singh nor his colleagues. You'll find that Starfleet is a lot more into exploration and observation than it is into conflict. Admiral Marcus was just one man. You will not be subject to the same thing a second time, on my word."

Khan stared unblinkingly at the man, judging him, coldly assessing him. Jakarel's hands were shaking. Rage burned again beneath her skin. She did not want _this._ She wanted the humans to suffer. She needed to have the gratification their screaming yielded to her.

Khan would not say yes. She had faith in this. Her conviction was so complete that she smiled thinly in anticipation of the resounding denial. She readied to fire the phaser.

"I accept," Khan's voice was level.

Jakarel turned to face him, bristling with rage and questions and _doubts_, and opened her mouth to demand some sort of reason from him. Her world continued to spin, blurred unpleasantly, before tipping upside down and fading into the blackness of unconsciousness.

* * *

**_"He terminated the programme, didn't he?" Khan asked Jakarel once they had made it back to their suite in Jakobi's estate. The lurid eyes of their family had kept Jakarel silent on what had occurred when Aidan took her from the lab and removed her back to the compound. Khan could see how hard it had been for her to walk as though she were not in pain. Her augmentations seemed to be failing in healing the wounds. "Can you continue to function, Jakarel?"_**

**_She didn't appreciate the question. It sounded like he was asking if she thought she could continue to be of use to him or if he should crack her apart now._**

**_"I am no longer of use to you," she responded. Reluctance thickened her voice as she admitted it. His expression darkened but she had averted her eyes so as not to watch him as he killed her. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing the anger in her eyes at having to die for such a shitty reason. "My work is destroyed, my assistants dead, and the fetus I carried is dead, as is my ability to bear offspring."_**

**_"You did not have that ability already," Khan decided to point out something that still bothered her._**

**_"I could have implanted a fetus in my womb. Now I am not able to even do that."_**

**_She strode from him, seated herself in front of the window, and crossed her arms. He did not follow yet but stood there and watched her._**

**_Something in her snapped and she bit her tongue to keep from screaming at him. The taste of bitter metal swept hotly through her mouth and she swallowed. Bile threatened to rise in her throat._**

**_"I cannot bear you children, whether naturally or artificially."_**

**_Khan approached her then, his gait as sinuous and hypnotic as the stride of a predatory cat stalking his prey. She anticipated death for her uselessness. Khan had no need for her any longer. She had failed to serve her purpose._**

**_"Once, you worried if we were growing too human," Khan said as he approached, slow and patient. "You doubted like a human, longed like them, and questioned the purpose of your existence. Now, you concern yourself with matters of the functioning of your body. What has changed in you, Jakarel?"_**

**_He leaned over her, his long form easily overshadowing her in the chair._**

**_She sighed and tilted her head to look him in the face. He was near enough for her to lean forward and steal a kiss from his mouth._**

**_"I want to be a mother, Khan," she whispered. She worried what the others would think of her. None of them desired to spawn with one another except to satisfy that desire to ensure a future population. What made her so different?_**

**_"Come with me," Khan grasped the hand nearest him, his warm skin bringing goosebumps to hers. He pulled her from her chair and drew her to his bed, their bed. She shook her head as though to deny him, for the first time, and he allowed her to escape his embrace and retreat. She had always thought the offer of refusal was a lie, a misleading sort of freedom of choice that wasn't exactly freedom. His lack of pursuit drew her back to him, her hands searching his body, seeking for something she shouldn't have wanted to find. He allowed her with that patient sort of predatory expression on his face that had once, so long ago, made her wary of him._**

**_Now she wanted him._**

**_"I love you," she murmured against his skin as her mouth sought that affirmation she so desired. He let her seek, let her kiss and stroke and strip. He was silent, unmoving, but watchful._**

**_When she was ready for him, begging for him, he finally responded. He enclosed the elegant hands around her waist, guided her onto him, and whispered his love for her._**

**_And when they were sated he kissed her._**

**_"You do not need to be the mother of my child for me to love you," he told her._**

* * *

**_Their intimacy had returned with the affirmation of love. Jakarel had not said it again though, not after he had given her what she wanted. There was no need. They could say it in other ways._**

**_"That wasn't so difficult, now was it?" Khan whispered to her when he passed her and her new assistants working on some way to fix the women. _**

**_She had volunteered as the test subject now. Some of the men allowed themselves to be injected with hormones as well, in the attempt to increase their virility, but it was hard to work around the natural inhibitors in place at the cost of their augmentations. _**

**_No matter how hard she tried, though, Jakarel remained infertile. Her fellow female volunteers experienced the same failures, but the males that participated demonstrated an increased level of testosterone with all the emotions that the increase entailed._**

**_Frustration had never been so potent. All she wanted to do was succeed._**

**She had to succeed.**

**Before they left.**

* * *

**Author's Footnote: **I'm weird. I'm seriously making up 'ship names for this story. How does Kharla and Khakarel sound? Or maybe Jakahn and Marlahn? Or Sinzi and Sivers? Or or or orororor...

I know, I know. You guys are probably thinking 'dafuq, Author? Dafuq?', yet I can't stop laughing at Khakarel... and I think Kharla is a sure-fire winner.

Oh god, what am I doing wasting my time on Tumblr.


	17. Chapter 17

**Author's Note: **When I'm done this thing, I'll go back and fix up all the boo-boos in the story and just generally make it sit together better. When I read over my old chapters my inner editor is just railing to get out of me and fix everything up. Like, usage errors and spelling errors and an overabundance of commas instead of the occasional semicolon.

Thanks for still being here and reading, you lovely, lovely people!

Also, I shall be removing titles from the chapters now, and when I return to do my edits I will remove those titles as well from the earlier chapters.

* * *

**Chapter Seventeen.**

She thought she was dead again, her mind wading through fathomless darkness in her unseeing mind. Voices cut into her, a thousand and one of them hissing and spitting and clawing with their words. She remembered the injections, the side effects, but was not afraid of the crushing tidalwave of hatred and sorrow and pure wrath.

If she was going to fall apart now, she would do it on her own terms.

But she could not ignore the words.

**You have to kill them all, make them bleed, cut them and burn them and scar them so they never forget you or what you've done. Never trust. Never love. You are not human and you never will be.**

**So wake up.**

She wished she did not feel, for the poisonous lances whispered in her mind corrupted her and fueled the anger that nestled itself deeply in all the Augments.

She knew she was going mad.

**Wake up.**

She wondered if she should kill herself.

* * *

She opened her eyes and flinched, arching into the soft mattress at her back, before she registered the cushion beneath her and sat up. Alarm ran rampant through her when she did not recognise the room. It wasn't her cell, the suite, nor was it the blank four walls of her earliest home. Her heart was tripping with uncertainty and the rushing of anger and fear that no Augment should ever have to feel.

She couldn't help it, though. Not after she knew...

"You are awake. He will be pleased."

Jakarel startled at the sound of the unfamiliar voice and turned around to face the speaker. It was an alien; mottled brown skin, high arched brows, and an unnaturally long mouth told Jakarel everything she needed to know. The humans had learned. They had sent a non-human to be there when she awoke. She couldn't help the feeling of amusement at the realisation, before the unsettling feeling of doubt washed over her.

They understood her far more than she believed.

"You should continue to rest," the alien said. She had an even voice, a soothing one, but Jakarel would not allow herself to be calmed so easily. She was not a meek human woman to listen to the ministrations of gentle beings she once didn't believe in. She was an Augment.

"I am fine," she said, tersely.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, noting the clothing the humans had given her after her imprisonment in the Starfleet compound had been exchanged for a simple nightgown with the same strange symbol over where the heart of the wearer would be.

It seemed they were trying to make up to her for the simple lifestyle she had lived, as though it were in her to _care_ what her clothes were. If clothing did not shield her body from the dangers of exposure to the elements she might have gone without clothing, and there had been times when she did forsake it., although those moments were in privacy or with Khan. He did not appreciate others seeing her the way only he should see her.

As she placed her bare feet onto the carpeted floor, trepidation crawled across her skin. The alien did not reach for her or touch her, preferring instead to take out her little weird cellular device and informing the people on the other side that _the Augment was awake_. For a moment, however briefly, Jakarel wished the alien was there to do more than to be present when she awoke. She could have used contact, physical contact, to settle her stomach and her nerves.

"How long was I unconscious?" The Augment did not pull herself off the bed as she had intended, preferring instead to maintain the appearance that she would not collapse should she stand. She would not show weakness.

**You are weak because of them.**

The voices were becoming less welcome the more they hissed at her instead of reinforced her comfort. She ignored them. There was no need to let them slip in and rake her mind with their dagger-like claws.

"Five days. They said that the lack of sustenance had stripped your strength bare and left you functioning only by your will alone. We have been feeding you intravenously, but as you were recovering it became apparent that your condition would allow you to feed on solids naturally once you woke."

Jakarel nodded. Her metabolism must have balanced itself in that case. The lingering weakness was troubling, though, although it seemed the alien did not notice her hesitancy.

"Where is my family?" The Augment asked eventually.

"They are taking the rehabilitation process very seriously and are currently under supervision in another part of the complex. Before you are allowed to join them, however, you will need to be subjected to tests to determine where you will be placed." Something like an apologetic tone became apparent to the Augment in the alien's voice, as though she were sincerely sorry that Jakarel couldn't be taken to her family immediately.

"Where is Khan?" Jakarel asked, her fingers tightening in the bedsheets.

"He is also receiving rehabilitation," the alien replied. "You will be allowed to see him as well once the tests are completed."

"Well, let's hurry up and get me through them already," Jakarel muttered.

The alien nodded. She paged again in her strange cellular device and, within moments, another had come to assist Jakarel to her feet. He was a human this time, as far as Jakarel could tell, and she felt disgust only when he helped her to her feet and offered her support as the alien led them out.

* * *

She was bored as she waited for the results of the testing to be brought to the doctor. The room was silent but for the calm cadence of breathing as Jakarel observed the walls pointedly and the doctor continued to stare at his patient. He knew that if he had been anything other than human, the Augment might have chosen to speak to him. Originally, he had believed the reports of her racial hatred of the human race as an exaggeration meant to villianise the woman further than even the name of her species already did. It was interesting to him then when, as soon as she saw him, the Augment refused to do so again and made a point to avoid looking at him. He suspected she did so in order to avoid a breakdown or a violent fit.

"What did the humans do to you?" He asked suddenly once his curiosity had grown enough and his boredom with the silence had become too overwhelming. "I already know you hate me for being a human, and I've come to understand that you think me incapable of understanding the reasons, but satisfy my curiosity for me, please. What did they do to you?"

Jakarel stiffened. He noted the tension in her body then and the way her entire bearing changed as she finally looked at the doctor again.

"They stole from me the child I might have had," Jakarel said slowly. "They ruined me and betrayed me. They killed everything I hold dear and left me with a family that will one day die out because we cannot reproduce."

"You were infertile already," the doctor said. He knew that as soon as his words left his mouth, he had said something wrong. The Augment, though, did not rise from where she sat and attempt to beat him as she might have done before. No, but the darkening of her red irises was a subtle clue to the wrath in her.

"I am what I was made to be," she said eventually. "But I was able to implant a fetus in my womb and it might have survived to term if-"

"If it had not been cut from you."

The doctor considered her then, closely, and could see that beneath the shielded glare only an Augment could possess, she was still human and uncertain and _sad_.

"If you allowed us, we might be able to help you," he said.

"And if you were not human, I might be able to trust you," Jakarel replied. She looked away again, wordlessly informing the nameless doctor that she was done with the conversation, and he accepted it.

She remained that way, like some flawless statue, even when the results of the various tests had been delivered to the doctor. He read the report, every page, and she remained motionless as though she did not feel discomfort.

"You are not a normal Augment, are you?" He said aloud, suddenly, and was rewarded when Jakarel looked at him again. "Not many of you share this specific genome, but those of you that do have it are-"

"Are going insane," Jakarel finished for him this time. Her voice was the hushed tone of open sorrow. The openness was unnerving for the doctor. She did not easily allow his kind to see the emotional turmoil her kind experienced.

"What was the point of this genome?" He asked. "It's artificially induced, that much is clear. Why-"

"We believed we were becoming human," Jakarel's whisper was soft now. "We could not stand to be that which created us. We wanted to be our own people, not bound by the same societal bonds your people are, and the alterations to our genetic coding was the mistake that would free us. It would allow us to work without the morals that kept us from making our greatest discoveries. I thought it would allow me to find a way to induce pregnancy in my sisters."

"You accepted the injections?"

"Obviously, if you can see the genome in those results," Jakarel returned to disdain suddenly. "I accepted two doses while most others accepted one."

"And now it is failing," the doctor concluded.

"It was failing three hundred years ago," Jakarel corrected, bitterness stinging in her voice. "It never succeeded."

None of the genetic alterations ever succeeded. The Doctors that created her people had done their jobs too well. They were beyond alteration now and were perfect replications of what the future of humanity would have been like.

"We can-"

"You cannot fix it," Jakarel snapped before the doctor could finish. "Are we done here now? May I be free to see my people?"

* * *

**_"We can't keep doing this," Jakarel's eyes rose as Aislin spoke out. Aislin's harsh green eyes were glowing in the small flames of the heating instrument. The lab was quiet but for the hiss of gas that fueled the cracking flames. "They will find out about the others and they will not understand what we are trying to do!"_**

**_"That is why we will explain it to them," Jakarel said. She was calm. The first injection had succeeded in levelling her emotions. The second serum was being prepared now. "We will be free, Aislin. That is enough for them to understand."_**

**_"But the others," Aislin began._**

**_"While the loss saddens me, it was necessary," Jakarel spoke with the decidedly cold tone a machine would have used. She did not sound sad at all. Aislin noted the change, remembered that Jakarel was moved by the death of their kind strongest. Now she was not even considering the ramifications of her actions._**

**_Still, there was a glimmer of something in the red eyes of the general that Aislin found comforting, a symbol that Jakarel was not lost to the serum._**

**_Yet she could not continue this work with the thought that others had died so the serum would be stable enough to use._**

* * *

**_The men and women that accepted the injection were assistants that Jakarel trusted and had the utmost faith in. Her science team, her research group, and hopefully they would be the ones to find the way to cure the women of infertility. They worked as one now, understood eachother even in silence, and they made leaps and bounds in reproductive sciences that were scrapped as nonsense when it was proven that they would not serve the Augment species._**

**_Their days were feverish and filled with savage discussions of what would be healthy for their females or not. They could not afford to work slowly. News was coming in as Germany's Augment populations were being slowly decimated by the uprising humans._**

**_Soon the storm would come to New Austria and the search for a way they could continue as a species was consuming. No longer did they think of rallying their loyalists. They might have fallen into obscurity as a whole if it was not known that one of their kind ruled over a city._**

**_It was once Jakarel's desire to convince Khan to take their people and find something to save them. Now, though, she was consumed by the thought that her serum could bring her mind to the heights that would take her to the revelation of a cure._**

**_The revelation never came and one day she awoke from the stupor of callous logic with the realisation that she had made a grave mistake._**

**_The uprising had come to New Austria finally._**


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen.**

The USS Enterprise was far, far away from Earth loosely orbiting an uncharted class-M planet with the designation Ceti Alpha V. Observations on the different forms of life on the planet's surface was well underway.

The study was tedious and boded boredom for the captain of the vessel. The sheer amount and variation of life that crawled the planet made for a long and taxing ordeal as they catalogued everything. James Kirk often looked down at the planet with the on-screen display longingly, wishing he could lead a team down to explore, but knowing that there were dangers there that would come and kill an unwary man with time to spare.

"Sir, incoming transmission from Starfleet," Nyota Uhura's voice was clear. She sat not ten feet from him at her own interface of buttons and touch-pad controls that enabled her to perform her duty as a communications officer.

"Play it, lieutenant," he said to her. The boredom was heavy in his voice.

On screen, a face digitised to reveal an unfamiliar Starfleet official. Kirk straightened visibly, excitement beginning to tingle its way up the length of his spine when he noted the authority in the wizened visage that greeted him. He _so _hoped there was an adventure coming his way.

"Captain Kirk, I am Admiral James Lewis," the mysterious official said.

"Greetings, sir," Kirk's use of the honorific came easily. "Is there some way we might be of assistance to you?"

He didn't need to tell the admiral just how difficult it might be for him to get his ship back to Earth to offer assistance. They were at least a month out which, when translated to how fast they had traveled to get to their location, meant they were _very far away_.

"It's come to my attention that you have earned a place in our histories for assisting in the take down of the criminal Commander John Harrison, known now as Khan. For this reason only are you being informed, now, that Khan Noonien Singh has been awoken from cryostasis, along with the rest of his crew, and are currently being held in the San Francisco Detention Centre as they are rehabilitated." The words were obviously reluctantly delivered and Kirk strongly believed that the admiral was not willing in his sharing of this news. He wouldn't have been surprised, either. It was a strange move to pull.

"May I ask why he was awoken?" Kirk had to inquire. He hoped, strongly, that the man, no matter how much they disliked eachother, was not serving another misguided fool while his 'family' awaited his compliance under threat of death. It hadn't worked so well when Admiral Marcus had attempted to do so. Kirk's concern was for the safety of Starfleet and the inhabitants of earth when a decidedly dangerous madman with nothing to lose turned his considerable wrath upon the planet Kirk loved.

"We did not wake him," Lewis said. "As it stands, he is cooperating fully and as is his family. The conditions of his release are widely unknown, even to us, but are highly confidential."

Kirk smiled, looking away briefly, before the smile eased away and he returned his gaze to the admiral.

"Permission to bring us home," he stated the question.

"Denied. Enjoy your mission, Captain," the admiral replied.

The transmission ended with that, leaving Kirk feeling the effects of denial weighing heavily on him. Without warning, and before his First Officer could address him, he shot out of his seat.

"Set a course for Earth," he ordered his helmsmen.

"Sir?" Commander Spock's formality was enough to get Kirk's attention.

"Can't let that bastard forget what I look like, can I?" Kirk laughed and clapped his friend on the arm.

Spock doubted that he was being wholly honest with his reason for disobeying orders.

* * *

The woman that was reviewing the results was a strange one and, despite her human appearance, she was distinctly _not._

Jakarel couldn't figure her out but she learned, after the short time she had spent with the woman, that she could barely _do anything_ without the woman somehow sensing her emotions and commenting on them.

It was an embarrassing, incredibly humbling, experience. It left Jakarel in disquiet.

"You don't need to be disgruntled," the woman said. Hollander. Her name was Hollander, Jakarel recalled. "My species is referred to as "empaths", but we are entirely human. Sort of like you, right?"

"I do not appreciate the comparison," Jakarel didn't need to say so. The disapproval poured off her like a tangible wave.

"No, but you do enjoy justifying yourself," Hollander replied. A faint smile curved her mouth. "It says here that you are antagonistic, narcissistic, _depressed_, highly prone to irrational fits of anger and hate, and that you just plain dislike humans for no reason other than that they didn't like you lording over them."

"I was made to rule them," Jakarel's tone was harsher than it needed to be. Hollander raised her cool blue eyes and smiled languidly at the woman. She could feel the tension. "My creation was to herald the future of peace humankind so longed for."

"Ah, but you did go about letting them know of your intentions _so well,_ how could they even think of suffering the illusion that you meant them any harm?" The taunt in her voice made Jakarel want to stand up and go over there to wring the woman's slender neck.

"And there is the anger," Hollander nodded. "So, do you also have the infamous Augment god complex?"

Jakarel resisted the urge that wriggled beneath her skin. She _would not_ kill the woman. She couldn't.

The anger had to dissipate somehow.

"They believe you need to take classes to control your anger and have prescribed a list of various medication they hope will assist in helping you cope with your issues, general," Hollander was the only one to use the title without it being insisted. Jakarel couldn't say she liked hearing her say the word, though. She was still angry. "It also says, right here, that you would suit best the position of a science officer or a doctor if you were to serve aboard one of our ships in Starfleet. Does this appeal to you?"

"I don't believe my personality would suit serving your Starfleet," Jakarel replied coldly. "And your medications would hardly serve their purpose unless they were meant to soothe the emotional troubles of large mammals."

She met Hollander's eyes, something like sorrow rising up in her as both women stared at eachother. Understanding glimmered in the eyes of the empathy.

_They wouldn't save me anyway._

"Shall we go see about getting you into some of the lessons we have arranged for you, then?" Hollander asked. She sounded suddenly very exhausted.

"That would be much welcome." Jakarel could still feel the anger, the heady explosion that begged to be released, and knew that just seeing another familiar face would soothe her anger and warm her again. She needed her family now, more than ever.

Hollander nodded.

* * *

**_"We cannot stay!" Aislin's tear-streaked face swam in and out of Jakarel's blurry vision. Blood trickled a hot trail down her forehead as she looked at the weeping sister that kept a steadying arm on her shoulder. Jakarel felt the urge to laugh, suddenly, when she noted that Aislin was actually crying._**

**_Augments didn't cry. She must be faulty._**

**_"We have to go! Hiltraude, help me!" Jakarel swayed as the firm grasp of the other woman enclosed her other slim shoulder. She leaned forward and vomited suddenly, emptying the contents of her stomach. There was black in the bile. "Shit," Aislin cursed._**

**_The world spun as both Hiltraude and Aislin pushed and pulled Jakarel to safety. There was the sound of explosions, screams, the wails of the dying and the weeping of the living. The smell the clung to the air was the essence of death and destruction._**

**_The world was ending._**

**_"Khan! Khan, we need you!" Jakobi's voice echoed from somewhere in the facility, a roar that drowned out most other sounds before it faded into oblivion. There was screaming again. Voices yelling. Gunfire. Death, death, death._**

**_Jakarel could feel the venom she put into herself chewing holes into her brain. The jagged shard of metal embedded in her stomach rended her muscles further and further to the point that her vision blackened unpleasantly._**

**_She tried to pull it out._**

**_"No! You'll bleed out if you remove it. We need- DOWN!"_**

**_They dropped within a split second of that shout as something, Jakarel couldn't identify what, exploded._**

**_She passed out to the sounds of groans._**

**_Death beckoned for her in the form of Khan, his graceful hand at the side of her neck as they stared out over an unfamiliar landscape before blackness consumed her._**

* * *

**_She woke long enough to scream before they put her back under._**

* * *

**_"There must be a haven for us somewhere," Khan's words were a mutter of concern and hope. She thought so, anyway. "Anywhere. I will take my people anywhere, we just need a means."_**

**_"There is a rumour," Jakobi's voice was clogged with emotion. Anger, madness, hate. Sorrow. "London. They have a programme there, controversial and highly promising."_**

**_"Loyalists?"_**

**_"Not many, but enough."_**

**_"Where at?"_**

**_"The Space Agency in Wiltshire."_**

**_Khan's disbelief was tangible._**

**_"Space," he muttered._**

* * *

Khan was the first face she saw when she was brought into the supposed 'class room' before she registered a number of other unfamiliar faces. Her other brothers and sisters were not present. She was confused but still soothed. The empathy behind her was pleased at the change in her emotional stability.

Khan greeted Jakarel by inclining his head slightly. She was surprised by the action, for it was something their kind typically used to suggest submission, but she suspected he used it as the informal visual way that humans said their hellos to one another. She couldn't help but incline her head in return, though.

They would not show the more intimate signs of their relationship was their wordless agreement.

"What class is this supposed to be?" Jakarel asked of the humans that observed her so intensely. She noted a Vulcan by the style of his hair alone and wondered at what kind of species allowed themselves to present such an unflattering cut in such a serious time and place. She wondered if it was a religious thing, if the Vulcans even had religion in their hyperlogical world.

"This will be how you learn to manage your anger," Hollander said. "We have agreed to let Khan be present, for it has become apparent under previous observation that the presence of your people helps you cope with your emotions. Additionally, we hope to observe the ways the augmentation you've done on yourself works in your chemical balance to determine a way to reverse the damage."

"There is no cure," Jakarel said. She was tired of this. "It will run its course."

"At the cost of everything you are," the Vulcan stated then. "While your initial cause had been noble, it is now prudent to attempt to remedy the serum you used to further enhance yourself before it consumes you entirely."

"We don't yet know what will happen when it has run its course," Jakarel glared at the Vulcan.

"It can be assumed that the ramifications will be dire, however to allow it to continue to manipulate you, you are allowing it to deepen its effect and further alter your genetics to the point where it will be far more dangerous to your health to not remove it immediately."

He was beginning to confuse Jakarel. She deigned not to reply.

"Come, let's sit and talk now," Hollander was trying to soothe her, Jakarel could tell, and for a moment she thought to refuse and argue and inevitably fight. However, Khan clasped a hand around her wrist and thoughts of retaliation died as soon as she registered the touch.

She was disgusted by how pliable she had become when with her family but she couldn't ignore the pang of emotion that responded to Khan's contact, however bare it was.

She followed _him._

Because of him, she could not ignore the humans when they began to talk.

He did have a way of making sure she did as she was supposed to.

It might have been _love._


	19. Chapter 19

**Author's Note: **So, a personal thing. I don't think I portrayed Marla McGivers in any way that she was portrayed in canon sources, so if that's giving people a hernia, you have my apologies. To be honest, I'm enjoying the feedback I've been getting in reviews. You people are fantastic, random strangers, and I'm in love with you all.

I really hope I do you proud when this all winds down and ends!

Also nobody noticed my foreshadowing, but now that I've said this I'd kind of be interested if anyone notices anyway. Just... don't give it away for everyone!

Thank you and... uh...

Author out.

* * *

**Chapter Nineteen.**

"You can't admit that you have emotions," Hollander's voice was the most unwelcome thing in the moment, the first thing that Jakarel took notice of rather than the presence of the observing humans. They had found that the empath bothered her, as Marla bothered her, and she felt that they were being unnecessarily cruel by sticking Hollander in the room with her. It was unfair that she couldn't hide behind her face in the presence of the empath. She had shields she trusted, emotional walls that she used to hide what she experienced from her brothers and sisters and _Khan._

Hollander stripped those shields from her with ease and left the bare, shuddering creature that she was underneath to be sliced apart from exposure. She was cornered and the real rehabilitation had only just begun.

"I do not have emotions," Jakarel replied. She had to fight to keep her temper down. The denial burned at her. She would not admit to a human, even if the human wasn't from earth, that she was in any way like them. She could not.

"I can feel them. As soon as you learn to accept them, you will never be at peace and you will never be able to move forward. Even Khan has them, and so does every other member of his crew." Hollander was trying to be reasonable yet Jakarel could only feel antagonised. She knew she shouldn't but she couldn't resist it.

She wanted to kill the woman and demonstrate every single emotion coursing through her body.

Hollander smiled.

Jakarel clenched her hands.

"It's a challenge, I know," Hollander said. "You think that because you don't associate yourself as human that you cannot be human nonetheless, however you forget that everything in your DNA is human but for the little bit of _'superhuman abilities' _you were given when you were still a fetus."

"I am superior in every way," Jakarel was beginning to snarl. She was gripping the armrests of the uncomfortable padded chair tight enough to stress the fabric.

"Does that make your brothers and sisters inferior for their emotions?"

Hollander's question pushed Jakarel further into her anger. She didn't need to deal with this, not now and not ever at all.

"I'm done," she said. She wanted to rip and tear.

"You aren't done yet," Hollander replied.

"I will _kill _you," Jakarel hissed, "I am done here."

They stared at eachother for a few long moments, and every second that passed increased Jakarel's desire to bleed the woman out. She needed to get out, but Hollander's expression did not give her much reason to believe that she would be allowed to go yet.

"We are making progress," Hollander said eventually. "You are currently experiencing anger. Can you tell the difference between anger and hatred, or are they so closely bound together that they are indecipherable to you?"

Jakarel turned her head away sharply. Her own expression was unpleasant. Hollander didn't need to be an empath to sense the radiating murderous intent in the room. She did not doubt that Jakarel would kill her if she had a chance, but she needed to continue to push.

"I will tear you open," Jakarel was muttering under her breath. "I will rip you apart and paint this room with your blood."

Hollander stared at her, Jakarel could feel her eyes. She was ready to jump up, to bite and kick and punch and _rip_.

"Tell me how you feel, Jakarel. Admit it, just this once, that you _do _experience emotions. The first step to healing comes with admittance."

Jakarel looked at her suddenly, her burgundy eyes sharp and glittering. A smile curled her pale lips. A chill traveled the length of Hollander's spine.

"I feel _anger_," Jakarel said as she stood, moving with the sleek power that the humans had come to expect of the Augments under their care. "I feel _wrath_," she continued as she straightened. "I feel _hatred._"

"Jakarel, sit down." Hollander's worry was evident to the Augment, increasing her own sick pleasure in the fear she could cause. Hollander could sense her intent, Jakarel figured, and she was trying to regain control of the moment.

"_I want to kill you_," Jakarel whispered.

"Send in the Augment, now," Hollander said aloud.

The door opened when Jakarel hesitated and in walked one of her sisters, Hilda. She relaxed from the half crouch she was moving into, as though she had been preparing to lunge at Hollander, and the emotions that had contorted her face were smoothed away, sealed behind the mask she wore that kept her defects out of sight of her family.

"We are done today," Hollander said quietly.

* * *

They did not let her spend time with her family for long. They used them to soothe her temper, to ease her anger, and to placate her when she was ready to bang her head against the wall out of boredom and madness. It was quickening, she told them when she was with her voice. It was burning itself out in the fastest way possible which, to the Augment, took too long for her to be at rest while it happened.

She saw Khan once every so often, but that was because they were teaching him what she had refused to learn. She would not belong to Starfleet. She would not answer to a human. She would not experience any feeling of camaraderie with the humans.

She would rather kill them all, and some days when Hollander stirred her up far enough, she was ready to tear down every single wall and kill every single human that walked the halls and sat behind desks.

When she saw Khan, felt the warmth of his life beside her, she was at her calmest. She knew she had to be, she always had to be. He could feel her cracking, she knew it, and she knew as well that when she cracked so far as to endanger their people, she would be killed, and her death at his hands would be the most loveless interaction they had ever had.

She sometimes woke up with the memory of his hands squeezing her skull.

She knew she was weak, she told herself this every day, but she did not want her people to see her as anything but strong even then, even when they had no reason to not already know. She was flawed, as were the few others that were left alive after all these years that accepted the serum. She was the worst, though.

* * *

"You have a talent with electronic devices," a Vulcan woman, Saavik, was assisting Jakarel, seated in a hard chair with no expression of discomfort on her fair face. Originally, Jakarel had been surprised to see a female Vulcan, having come to expect their species to be entirely male. "We've found that your release from your cryotube was originally instigated by an electrical surge. Can you explain?"

"Can't you explain it for me?" Jakarel sounded weary. She sat straightbacked and proud, but the way she sagged nonetheless suggested she was exhausted. She could not sleep with the memory of being crushed in her mind any longer. Her heart felt like it was going to rip itself out with her anxiety and worry.

She was feeling far too much.

"Is this another side effect?"

"I do not know what it is," Jakarel responded. She was softer with these aliens, less likely to snap and spit and bite with her words. "I discovered it only recently and I wish I had not."

**Do not...**

"I would rather be asleep than suffer another day in this turmoil," Jakarel closed her eyes. The way she relaxed her face erased the age she seemed to have accumulated with the stress, youthening her entirely. She did not look the thirty years that she was. This was something all Augments shared.

"If you did not have the ability neither you nor your family would be here today," Saavik said.

"And we would be better off for it," Jakarel finally put bite into her words.

"Does being here bother you so much?" Saavik's words were murmured, as though she had the feelings humans possessed and therefore felt pity for the Augment. Jakarel did not appreciate the pity.

"Yes," she hissed.

**...let them win.**

* * *

"What have they been showing you?" One of the few moments she was allowed to share with Khan was nearing its end. They were under observation during every interaction they had, otherwise Jakarel might have allowed herself to be closer to him. As it was, their nearness put her on edge. She could feel his hands even when they weren't touching her. He could see the tension, but he did not comment on it. Not with words, anyway.

"They have been trying to show me how to relieve my anger," Jakarel responded. She sounded bitter. Her fingers on his wrist tapped out a pattern. His fingers on her wrist responded with another pattern. They knew the humans would be able to see it, but they doubted they could understand it. The Augments had their ways of talking without talking, this much history had long since made clear. To see it being used would give them something new to try to figure out. It would keep them interested in the Augments, allowing them the time to work out their goals with their wordless communication.

"Are they succeeding?" Khan asked after a moment.

"They know they are not," Jakarel replied.

**Squeeze.**

She squeezed his wrist as a sharp stab of pain sliced through her head, preceding the headache that would render her incapable of functioning.

He tapped out a wrist, resorting to this wordless discussion instead of the spoken one, understanding that his words would only hurt her.

_When? _She asked.

_Soon,_ he replied.

She squeezed his wrist harder as a particularly nasty lance of pain slipped through her thoughts, driving deep in and wriggling through the cracks of her psyche.

**Break.**

She might have broken his wrist if he did not hiss and pry her fingers away. The violence was under their skin, waiting to come spilling out, even for one another.

**Break.**

"Time's up," Hollander opened the door then, stepping in. Jakarel's eyes shot open and she saw through the corner of her eye that Khan seemed ready to jump to the human and wring her neck for daring to interrupt something.

"I require more time with her," he said. "Privacy, as well, if you care to give us it."

"I require rest," Jakarel said, and she could see that Khan did not like her contradicting his words. It was necessary, though. She wanted to rip and tear and break and knew that if she spent even a few more minutes with another person, Augment or not, she would crack and break.

And she would write her own death sentence if it were to happen with Khan present.

"Come along then," Hollander said to Jakarel. Jakarel rose to follow, but Khan caught her wrist in his hands and squeezed the warning she knew was coming. She nodded slightly and he released her, allowing her to look him in the eye and lower herself into something like a bow to admit that he was dominant and she had done wrong in contradicting him.

"Rest well," he told her once she had straightened.

It sounded like a threat.

**Break.**


	20. Chapter 20

**Chapter Twenty.**

There were days when Jakarel was not being reconditioned to suit the new world she had revived herself and her family into. Instead of being presented the facts of history, she was sat on a horribly soft chair she suspected the humans decided would be comfortable to her and was asked all sorts of questions she found incredibly similar to the questions asked by doctors and psychologists while she was still malleable and innocent to her designs.

She decided she did not like the association and, because the humans insisted on evaluating her, she disliked them even more.

They were trying to enforce in her a sense of individuality and freedom, telling her that she was allowed to be her own person and to not have to submit for every little action she completed that went against what she was _supposed_ to do. It was hard for her to understand what they were trying to tell her to be, as though she weren't enough as she was already. She _was _an individual, she _was _free. They must have thought she was a tool, a mindless weapon to obey the whims of the stronger.

When she thought about it, she decided that yes, she was a tool. Razor sharp and slim, able to slip between the lines and pierce deeply when ordered. She was the weapon of destruction.

But she was her own person.

"When you interact with Khan, you subconsciously tilt your head as to imply submission." The amount of faces presented to her was starting to become disconcerting. She didn't recognise this person but for a few fleeting glances she managed to sneak into the rooms of her brothers and sisters when they were also being attended by psychologists. "You've done this intentionally as well."

"You address your superiors differently than you address your peers, don't you?" Jakarel asked, softly. She was being remarkably compliant, she knew, and something secretive caused a small smile to flit about her face.

"As a term of respect," the man said. "We address them as a matter of respect and admiration."

"And I submit for those same reasons," Jakarel bit out. "This does not change the fact that I am my own person, until I am needed for my prowess, at which time I serve in the role I am desired to play. As you are."

She noticed one of her sisters had paused to watch the proceedings through the window of the observation room. Jakarel began to tap her fingers on her knee restlessly and returned her gaze to the man.

She could see how fragile was, even compared to her, as his pulse beat against the column of his long throat. She could read the lines of tension in his face and bearing, see the uncertainty behind the grey gaze that peered at her with shy intensity. She could squeeze him until he burst.

And when he began to break, she would show him her individuality.

"What is your relationship to Khan Noonien Singh?" The man surprised her with the question. She had thought the answer was known already, something implied but never admitted to. "You are his general, yes, but you do not serve in a combative method, which makes you almost superfluous to him. He has fighters that are scientists, and the other females are more imposing than you are. Were you given your position of honour because of your personal relationship to him?"

Incredulity burned through her, followed quickly by anger at the insult. She was aggravated and this translated to the position she held herself. The change was visible and immediate and the temperature in the room seemed to drop significantly.

He _dared_ to lessen her prowess and importance. He _challenged _her reasons for existing.

He _implied _that she was worthless, afforded her position due to Khan's _sentiment. _

She was on him before he could call out, the realisation of what he was implying driving her from the realm of complacency and into that dark, consuming anger that burned a black mark into her heart.

She knew there would be security as soon as she had moved and so she acted quickly, driving her blows into him with decisive brutality. He bled for her, moaned and wept and weakly tried to defend his vital points, an instinct that disgusted the Augment so deeply that she decided she would break his arms.

He took the beating after that, losing his grip on reality even as she was pulled from his body by the firm grip of unknown men much larger than her, although in the haze of anger and disgust she did not stop herself from fighting with them.

She only calmed when she saw Khan, and that was long enough for a sense of horror to wash over her and sink her heart deep in her chest.

She would die, now.

"If you harm her, I will make sure every single one of you suffers," Khan promised under his breath as she was dragged past, suddenly ceasing her struggles in anticipation of her imminent doom. She felt the taste of iron biting on her tongue and tensed, imagining the pressure of his hands on her neck. One twist and she would be nothing more than a pile of bones on the ground, made impossibly more useless and broken with the snapping of her neck.

They deposited her in something like her old cell in the Starfleet compound, the similarities ending with the fact that one wall was an entire window that showed her other rooms, uninhabited currently.

She was docile again when she realised she was alone, her simmering anger sinking back down to nestle against her scorched heart. Pacing restlessly, she approached the window and began to beat against it with her fingers, tapping her patterns out with no meaning. She felt no need to rest, having slept already, and no hunger gnawed at her gut. She could only tap on that glass, feel, and listen.

As some sort of drug was administered through the vents that brought air to the cell, slowly pulling Jakarel into a dreamless sleep, she began to fold against the window, her legs curling under her body as she slumped down. She felt amusement as her world grew dark.

* * *

**_The ship wasn't much to look at, and the idea that had been made clear to her wasn't so promising. She never liked flying and had been glad that the few occasions she had to fly during the war had been overnight, mainly, to avoid enemy aircraft. The thought of space travel now was far less appealing than taking a plane across the Pacific in broad daylight._**

**_As the Augments recovered from their losses and injuries, Jakarel found it hard to be confined to a small building with over seventy others. She was restless and angry, frustrated even more so by her lack of options with what she could do to exersize herself. They had to remain hidden until they were certain of their next move, knowing that they would be forced to fight until the death if they were found out. England was not a country that sympathised with the plight of the Augments. Their subjugation had been hard won and difficult to maintain. It was tricky, then, to remain under the radar as various organisations sought them out._**

**_Jakarel had been confused to the bounty she had heard was on the head of any Augment. She found it hard to believe that the humans were so deceived by their arrogance that they did not realise the Augments had only been trying to help them in the only ways that they knew how._**

**_Her stress was making it hard for her to rest at night or eat during the day. She was thinning again, as she had when she first met the male Augments in New Austria. She felt a weakness in her body that made her even angrier and more anxious than she had been already. She knew that the others saw her and talked about her in their silent ways. She could feel their eyes and words on her mind and wanted to lash out at them and let them know that she was still fit to advise their leader._**

**_She was not the only one suffering._**

**_Jakobi had lost his mate when he lost New Austria. His agony was palpable when he was in a room, the silence he now embodied a loud reminder that he was not the same man he had been. Jakarel couldn't even remember her name._**

**_Konig and his brother were both lost, leaving a gaping hole in the chests of their wives. She could feel that particular grief even when night had fallen and she was left alone to find a place to sleep._**

**_Khan had not spoken to her since their arrival and she did not seek him out, understanding that he would not want her to advise him on his next move. He had to decide now where they would go. She could not afford to second-guess him, not in the conditions they found themselves, and so she pretended to sleep alone at night as far from her brothers and sisters as possible, letting time slip by as she wandered her waking dreams and imagined what it might have been like if she were human and nothing else._**

**_There was a desire there, in her heart, to see the world burn for everything she had suffered and seen her family suffer. She loved her people, with the heart she wished she did not have, and their pain made her wrath stronger. As she lay on her back and stared at a blank expanse of ceiling, she wondered if she could slip out of the building one evening and set Wiltshire on fire before burning the heart out of every single city that had rejected her people and the peace they had been trying to enforce._**

**_Khan found her one night when she was imagining the crumbling of the human cities. He did not ask her permission to join her, merely lowered himself down to lay next to her. The small contact they had as they both stared at the ceiling in their respective silences was enough to make Jakarel's pain grow a hundredfold._**

**_"Have you come to a decision, Khan?" Jakarel's whisper was muted. She knew her brothers and sisters had incredible hearing, for they were Augments after all, and so she did not wish them to hear._**

**_What warmth he might have felt before that moment was stripped by her question. _**

**_"We will be departing soon," he told her. "That is all you must know, general."_**

**_Jakarel flinched at the use of her title, deciding she didn't like it when he used it to address her._**

**_"Wie sie wollen, mein führer." Jakarel's reply was equally formal. She could feel the radiating heat of his displeasure against the side of her body that faced him at the use of the German title. It was generally an unspoken rule that the Augments keep to the English language and not fall to speaking to the language of the nations they were created within. Khan clasped Jakarel's thin wrist, felt the bones, and squeezed his warning._**

**_She was struck with the sudden urge to hit him and hope that he would kill her._**

**_Turning her head to look at him, she found he was already staring at her. The vivid eyes that watched her face were cold and mocking and unfriendly, like he knew what she wanted to do and he was challenging her to do it, to give him an excuse to make his own burden easier to bear._**

**_"As you wish," she told him in English, the murmur soft and hard at once. She wanted him to strike her, to inflict upon her his dominance and to make her realise she was nothing but inferior to him._**

**_He did not disappoint her when he seized her shoulders and crushed her body to his. He asserted his dominance with the brutality she had come to miss from him, and then made sure that she wouldn't forget it when he marked her with his teeth and bruised her with his untamed force._**

**_And she reminded him that she loved him still before she admitted what she had done before they were removed from New Austria._**

**_And he told her that he would save them all._**

* * *

She woke up on her bed, disoriented from the drugs they had used on her, and registered that she was no longer in her cell with the calmest response she had mustered in many days.

"You killed a man in cold blood," the voice was one that Jakarel remembered immediately, a voice that made her stiffen. Marla had returned. "You are lucky you have somebody that cares so much for you, or they would have put you to death for your actions."

"Get out of my room," Jakarel said, sitting up as smoothly as possible. She did not want the woman to see the condition she was in. She did not want the woman to realise she was not the Augment she might have been at one point. She did not want to be apparent as a defective specimen. "You are invading and I do not like that."

She was trying to maintain some amount of civility as she faced the human, focusing her devilish eyes on the comparatively innocent gaze of the human. Marla was uncertain in her bearing as the Augment faced her, threatened visibly by the awareness that Jakarel displayed.

"You are pushing your luck, Jakarel," Marla said quietly. "They are trying to help you and you responded to them by hurting them. Do you understand what this is showing them?"

"I do not need you to advise me, human," Jakarel said. She pushed herself to her feet, swaying slightly before she hardened her stance. She _would not _show this woman her weakness. She had dominated Marla already and would not relinquish this. Not ever.

"You'll need my help in the end, Miss Zenzi," Marla sighed. She had something like pity in her light eyes. Jakarel began to tap her fingers restlessly, expressing her uncertainty with the situation in that small way as she began to prowl towards the human historian-psychiatrist. She took pleasure in the amount of fear she saw in Marla's eyes. "Before you get yourself and your people killed, you'll need me."

"The day that I need you is the day that you will die," Jakarel hissed.

Marla nodded as though in agreement, but her expression was doubtful.


	21. Chapter 21

**Author's Note: **Thank you all for your wonderful reviews! I'm still writing by the seat of my pants, so even though I have an end all ready and stuff I have to wander my way towards the proper moment to end this story. Our journey is over half complete, though, of this I am certain.

Stay tuned for a Klingon story that will be taking place after the incident on Qo'noS. Can't promise it will be as long lived as this, but I may intertwine the protagonist of that story in this one eventually as well.

Bringing back Kirk soon, as well.

* * *

**Chapter Twenty-one.**

**Break.**

Jakarel woke up, unaware that she had fallen asleep until those first moments of awareness. Her head was pounding, her heart thudding rapidly, and every bit of her body tensed and ready to act, responding to something she wasn't yet consciously aware of yet.

**Crush.**

**Snap.**

**Tear.**

**Break.**

She sat up and looked around at the dimly lit surroundings she recognised as her bedroom, every sense on alert for whatever it was that had awoken her. She felt the first pangs of consuming hunger gnawing in her stomach but ignored the feeling. She couldn't afford to be distracted if there was immediate danger.

**Kill.**

She felt her reality crumbling, fracturing under the tidal wave of all-consuming rage that rose with the barest provocation. She felt her grasp splinter, sliver into shards that cut and sliced into her. She imagined them as physical wounds.

"Be calm," Khan's voice was soft in the darkness, shattering the images of her skin covered in blood and returning the dim room she had slept in. She could see him now, or rather his outline, and inhaled deeply. She could smell him and her sense of smell was more trustworthy than her sight at that instant.

She could feel his presence as well, his personality weighing in on her mind like a physical pressure pressing on her body.

"I am calm," Jakarel stated, her voice as gentle as his. He stalked forward, sleek and powerful as a large cat. His eyes gleamed, reflecting the sparse light afforded by the window into the corridor, and Jakarel instinctively made space for him on her bed. She knew that he had been admitted entry by the humans and so was ready for what the humans would want of her.

He took the space she cleared, seating his long body next to hers. She could feel his presence pushing down on her, crushing against her.

Something snapped and everything was suddenly so clear to her as she followed his movements with her eyes. She could see every facet of gold in his otherwise blue-green eyes, could follow the movement of breath as it brushed over the fine hairs of his arms. The fine veins under his skin throbbed with heady life and she even fancied that she could see every pigment that coloured his skin as though he were made of pixels and was projected on a screen.

"Why have you come?" Jakarel asked him.

He did not immediately respond, instead reaching to her and brushing his hand along the slender curve of her jaw. She jerked as though shocked by the contact, flinching, and something broke even more in response within her.

"Do you think I have come to kill you?" His voice rumbled against her, vibrating in her chest. He must have felt her recoil, for his fingers curled against her chin to grip her and hold her still. "Is that all you have come to expect of me recently?"

"It is only right that you do so," Jakarel murmured. "I will turn against you, Khan, and break everything we both have fought so hard to preserve."

"You are one of my people, one of those I hold most dear, and even if you had been unknown to me but for a brief encounter, I would still not kill any of those that I cherish." Khan's threatening voice was as soft as her voice, silken all the same, and she smiled just barely. She remembered that he loved her as an Augment and not only as his closest companion, although this fact was often left unstated but assumed during the years of their conquest and eventual defeat. Love moved them deeply, all Augments, and even as Jakarel understood this she had no desire to admit this.

"Why have you come, then?" Jakarel relaxed into his hand finally and he continued his action of running his long, elegant fingers along her jaw.

He tapped his fingers against her cheek gently as though to reprimand her for asking him a question. She smiled though and lifted her hand to mimic his movements, touching him in the familiar way they had once done before their world was shattered and they were exiled. If there were humans watching, they would see two people expressing their wordless emotions for one another in a gentle way that Augments were not prone to doing things. The gentleness was necessary, though, given the sensitivity of Augment skin. The gentlest of Khan's caresses was as firm as him cupping her cheek at times depending on her awareness of the action.

"They have allowed you a laboratory to continue your research," Khan told her after enough silence had passed as they just touched. Jakarel retracted her hand, curled her fingers, and looked at the door expecting to see Hollander or Marla there, gloating.

"Why would they give me such an honour?" Jakarel asked. Her tone of contempt was for his ears alone. "I might make a toxin to kill them all and they will kill me for it in the end."

Khan's face contorted in something like rage and she felt pleased at the possessive turn his hand on her face had taken. He still loved them. He still lived for them. Memories of his recollection of his suffering under Starfleet's control reminded her that he had done everything he did for _her_.

"For your death alone I would burn the heart out of this world," Khan growled. "I will not lose any other member of my family, not to these people, ever again."

Jakarel nodded. They sat in silence for some time, not even speaking in their voiceless way, and Jakarel found she had rather missed this, their easy way of being together without being together. She could remember distinctly some of those days where she painted the scenery in Nolanda while he lounged with her, or modelled for her, and their discussions and relationship had come so much easier than now.

She detested herself for being so sentimental but she could not bear to push him from her. Instead, she enjoyed this while it lasted and slowly allowed herself to be lulled back to sleep in the security his presence lent to her. Before she was out fully, she made one last gesture of her desire and feelings for him and he reciprocated in his strange way, combining his love with his sense of ownership.

She was happy for that little sliver of normalcy in this strange world before her dreams swallowed her whole.

* * *

"She didn't accept," Hollander stated. Her expression was irritated, to say the least, as she addressed Khan after his emergence from the room they were keeping his wife within. "We allowed you time with her for a reason. Do not make us rethink our offer, Khan."

Khan had half a mind to kill her, right then and there, for her intentions, but he knew she wasn't the root of the problem and that ending her life was not going to benefit his people in the end. So, he stared at her with his piercing, frigid eyes that had looked upon his woman, and his people, with so much _warmth_ that the changes made him seem alien. He did not care how these _people _viewed him, only so long as his people were safe.

"She accepted," he stated. He had the utmost faith that she had not meant to leave the question unanswered. He had observed in her eyes and felt in her movement that she wasn't even certain of what was real or not any longer. That troubled him, but he kept those thoughts hidden from his human captors to be pondered with Jakarel when the time came. "You may approach her about it once she is recovered and well."

Hollander nodded, pleased, and excused herself to report the glad tidings to whichever foolish Starfleet admiral was in charge this time. Khan's disgust at her ease of reporting success in his manipulation manifested as an actual flavour on his tongue; metallic and overbearing. He glared at her retreating back, thinking. There were words to describe his feelings for being returned to this cycle of "use or we will kill your loved ones" but they were left to fester in his mind while there still remained the second human to keep him company.

He looked at her now, this Marla McGivers, and saw in her the same strength that had unknowingly made Jakarel think slightly better of her than she thought of any of the other humans she had met.

"I'm sorry," Marla said to him, although if she was apologising for condoning his utilisation or for the manipulation of his own wife, or girlfriend she did not know, was unspoken. He thought she might be apologising for both, and in return something cold and harsh crossed his face and his eyes spoke of that familiar pain he had hoped to never suffer again.

"Your apologies will not save you," he said. He stepped nearer, keeping a wary eye on the nearby security should they take his movement as an attack just waiting to happen, and lowered his voice. "You will all die for what you have been doing, and are thinking of doing."

She shuddered at the threat, feeling the chill of his voice pressing into her body, but held her ground. He could see the fear in her eyes and was glad for it, glad for human weakness. It reaffirmed his belief that the species was not strong enough to contain them any longer, and that he was right to begin preparations for the immediate departure of his people.

"I will be returned to my quarters now," he stated.

He left her, taking with him the security that had been assigned to exercise force should he go rouge, and she remained to stare into the sleeping Augment's room with something like concern etching lines into her young face.

* * *

**Author's Footnote: **About the tapping: it's something of their own design. Pretty simple, really, but that's where they will go wrong even though the simplicity has protected them so far, because nobody expects a superhuman race to use something so easy to pick up on once you get the basics down.

Basically, everything is spoken through the use of a single hand. There are two-handed varieties, but that's something different and a little stranger depending on where the users originated from. So, on this single hand there will be five fingers. Assigned to each finger is a series of letters, five in total, that are in consecutive order. Therefore, depending on who is using it, A-B-C-D-E could be expressed with the thumb or with the little finger. Different letters equated to an increase in consecutive taps with that finger. So, C-A-B would be 111-1-11 with nothing to express the spaces between letters except a slight pause too quick typically for a human to notice, but to a sensitive Augment it is just enough. In general, there are no spaces at all. The twenty-sixth letter is expressed with a swipe of the thumb, or little finger. This is almost always the letter Z although some dialects, excluding Khan's, express the letter M with the swipe for it is the centre letter in the English alphabet (at least for the purposes of this story). So, that's it. Not quite Morse code, although I thought of using that. The problem is that people have known about Morse for quite some time now and I didn't want to make it that easy. Mine is far more complex, unless you speak it.

Just felt the need to share that. J Hope it makes some sort of sense beyond what my head is thinking!


	22. Chapter 22

**Chapter Twenty-two.**

His patience was thinning dangerously the longer his people stayed corralled in this damned compound. He hated the anticipation that one day, soon hopefully, he would be given the chance he had promised his people that would lead to their freedom.

It was so hard to not beat against the wall in his frustration as days turned to weeks, and then to months. It was irritating to see them withering beneath the poison the humans tried to pump into them, hard to understand that the necessity of individuality would one day pull them all apart. He needed to keep them close, though, until he knew that they would not be used to satisfy the curiosity of the humans.

Khan couldn't stand to see them smiling, even if the smiles were tight and hard, at the things the humans said and did to amuse them. He found his comfort with Jakarel's reactions to the same antics used to convince the Augments of lesser quality that they could be human, too.

Although, he found it difficult to be in her presence without wanting to succumb to the desire to touch her, either to caress her and pull her to him so he might satisfy the carnal desires of the flesh, or to strike her for the insolence she embodied that threatened the strained hold he kept on their race.

He did neither, for he suspected the strain would kill her. No, he bided his time for both.

He had to find them to safety as he had promised them _centuries_ ago.

* * *

"She is responding to therapy much better, now that she has a workplace to think out her problems," one of those nameless doctors Khan despised so much was addressing him. When Khan focused his eyes on the thin wisp of a girl, she flinched and he smiled just slightly, pleased that he could still frighten these people even when he was not able to harm them. He could imagine how delicately her neck would snap when his people were ready and their opportunity came. He could imagine her delectable screams as his people murdered hers.

And he didn't even care to know her name.

"She would respond much better if you all did not try to force your views upon her," he said. Despite the humour he felt, his voice was cold. He did not laugh for a human, not even if it was at her fragility.

"We appreciate that they all respond to counter-conditioning," Hollander, he would recognise her voice and put a name to it anywhere, drew his eyes next. The slight smile died as he met the eyes of the empath and he considered far darker things to do to her once he would be able to free his people. Perhaps, he would allow Jakarel to have her first. He knew her well enough to see how much she despised this strange human. "Jakarel is included, although we know that neither of you would admit it."

Khan stared down at her, his icy gaze penetrating, and she did not wither under the stoic gaze. He would have liked to pluck her eyes out. That would amuse him more physically.

"You have brought me here for a reason. I would not be without binds if you did not think your offer would keep me from harming you, so what do you want?" He spoke with that elegance his captors had found entrancing, even when it was Marcus keeping him. They would not have expected someone to speak so fluidly to actually be a tyrant, and that was how they all made their mistakes, and would end up making their mistakes, in the end.

Hollander's returning smile was chilly. He longed to crack her jaw so all she might do is grimace.

"We have need of your services, Khan," she began. She turned from him to look into that laboratory they kept Jakarel at work in. "Hers as well, but yours would be all we require for her to fall into step."

"My services with what, exactly?" He bit out the question, anticipating the answer.

"The Klingons have started a war, you've known that this would happen irregardless of Marcus' death. What he started put it into motion and soon we will be under attack. I want you to return to your work on the weapons you were developing for Marcus, and I want her to work on a biological weapon that would help our victory."

_Yes, _Khan thought icily, _nothing actually ever changed._

"I was promised that you people would not attempt to use me, or my people, for your war efforts," he said. He was surprised at how calm he sounded even as the anger began to rise. He could not look at the woman or the small doctor for he knew he would lash out. "Has humanity become so hollow since I went to sleep?"

"We will have no choice but to kill her, then, and the others that share her mutation." Hollander sighed as though genuinely put out by this. "We cannot cure them, Khan, and nor can we let them live out their lives like this. You hate it here, I can feel it. Can you imagine their torment? We need you to repay what you owe in us keeping them alive. Jakarel would do better developing biological weapons than working on improving her genome as she does even at this moment. You yourself could do with the stimulation. You were made for war, Khan."

Jakarel seemed to feel them staring at her finally, for she stiffened under the observation and lifted her head. Her eyes flitted over the despised faces of the humans before settling on Khan. Like a bad habit, she began to tap her fingers on the table as though cuing them to be on their way, but Khan could see the question. He nodded, so slightly, and then looked to the doctor.

"You play with fire, Hollander, but I will accept and so shall she, as you know. I wonder, though, if you can take the burn," his voice lowered to a dark murmur the more he spoke until he was snarling. His face was contorted, however briefly, into that mask of Augment rage they had seen so often on the unruly prisoners, and Hollander stepped back.

"Return to your quarters," she said.

He seemed ready to refuse, to stake his claim to dominance, and his cold eyes burned a line of fire through Hollander when they met with hers. She felt fear in the wake of his dispassion that was replaced by the pure hatred she had come to expect from the Augments they had deemed _Fragments._ He met her eyes for so long, and kept her gaze, that she knew he was imagining all the ways he could torture her before she died for everything they were doing to his people.

She thought he might have reached out to snap her neck, and a gesture of her worry had the guards running for them. However, rather than breaking her, he nodded ever so slightly and turned on his heel. He glanced back at Jakarel in the room for a moment before he continued on his path towards his quarters.

Hollander realised she was trembling with fear as the Augment left. She might have known to do more than tremble if she had seen the matching expressions on both Augments before she also left.

* * *

If Jakarel would have ever heard her people were capable of having fun and expressing joy, she would have scoffed at the speaker and asked, ever so sweetly, what world they came from where their weapons had the feelings of humans. If she had not seen for herself the gleeful expressions of violence and destruction, she would have thought her people incapable of having fun.

She smiled, for she had been so very wrong.

Aislin groaned as she was tossed unceremoniously from the fray of Augments, but the glimmer in her vivid eyes was one of amusement. She rose from where she landed, racked by trembling pain in her limbs, before she bolted back into the clot of limbs and bodies built for war-like perfection.

Soon after, the spotted ball rolled out of the midst of Augments followed by the smallest, and youngest, of the group. She sported cuts and scrapes from blows she had taken and a limp seemed to inflict itself upon her leg, but she laughed as she ran nonetheless. Pursuit came not long after in the form of Nicholas and Kellen, both men bent on swiping the football from the child-Augment before she made it to the net that had been rigged, simply one of the two that the humans decided to allow the Augments use of.

There was a collective flinch among the men and women of Starfleet when Kellen tripped the child, followed by Nicholas driving his shoulder into her stomach when she pivoted, and somebody thought to start forward to help the child.

"She will not require your assistance," Khan's voice broke the stunned silence of the humans, halting the medic. "Unlike _your_ children, Elena is perfectly capable of taking care of herself."

He didn't need to state it out loud, but it was also clear that no Augment would willingly kill another, not even for a football.

The child lay on the ground, shaking with a fit of pain, before she smothered it behind the facade they had all been encouraged to hold, and laughter blossomed across her face when Aislin made herself useful and assisted the girl to her feet. Nicholas scored a goal as the two females interacted and Jakarel smiled at the dynamic they created. Aislin had once been selected to carry an embryo, but now that it was impossible to do so with the current laws of Earth, Jakarel was pleased to see that the only Augment that could be classified still as a child had taken a liking to one of the aspiring mothers of the group.

"Does this game amuse you?" The voice of Hollander broke through Jakarel's reverie and she glanced at her sharply, her expression of enjoyment melting away to one of undisguised contempt. Wordlessly, news had traveled through the Augments of the new agreement founded between Khan and the woman. There would be no kindness between them, now.

"I find it gratifying that you would allow my people their time to play, doctor. I wondered how long you would keep us kenneled indoors, like dogs," Jakarel responded, her voice much kinder than the dark glimmer in her red gaze. Hollander could feel her emotions dripping from her in pure waves of utter _feeling_ seeking to drown and smother her. She imagined that Jakarel was smiling as she crushed the empath under the full weight of everything she was feeling, and it was with a sickening feeling in her own gut that Hollander realised she was letting the Augment get to her.

Jakarel looked away soon enough to pay attention to the game, her face settling into the mask of disinterest. She longed to participate, to exercise as her brothers and sisters were, and it was the tightening of her jaw that gave her away. However, Hollander had made it clear that she was not allowed to participate. Jakarel suspected that the humans didn't want her to harm her own brothers and sisters in what was supposed to actually be a friendly game, but it wouldn't have mattered at this point with the beatings that were being delivered whenever the football made itself to another Augment. The Augments were fast and brutal, as always.

"I hope you understand why we cannot let you participate," Hollander said to the Augment softly. It sounded almost like she was goading for a response, something violent that would allow her to have Jakarel restrained and taken back indoors to be drugged. Jakarel clenched her fists, now, and her eyes glimmered even more. "Some dogs should be kept in their kennels," she finished.

With a snarl, Jakarel moved, although it wasn't to strike out at Hollander. Instead, she broke into a run before she could be restrained and pulled back and launched into the game as though she had been playing the whole time. Hollander expressed blatant shock at the woman's choice and heard the steely laugh of a man that truly found the situation to be of the utmost amusement.

"I do believe you are provoking the wrong Augment, doctor," Khan said. The icy eyes bore into the empath, sending the unmistakable message that he would be glad to kill her right then.

"Call her back," Hollander demanded. The Augment gave her a look of disgust before looking away to pay attention to the game. She wanted to yell in frustration, and the smallest smirk on the face of the leader of the Augments wasn't helping.

"Only when the time is right," he said to her.

He watched the game in silence after that, until the doctors and the guards shut it down and urged the Augments inside. There were expressions of glee still on the faces of the men and women, marked with blood and grass as they were, but when they saw the stony expression on Khan's face their eyes sparkled with anticipation and the laughter ebbed from their expressions.

He smiled then, once he made sure the last was inside and out of danger of harm from overzealous guards.


	23. Chapter 23

**Author's Note: **In light of a response I sent to someone via a PM, my excuse for my absence is my recent resurgence into roleplay and the world of real life. Hopefully I speed up my posts to this story in the future. Folks, thanks for holding on. J

* * *

**Chapter Twenty-three**

_Pain lanced across her side as she collapsed, curled into the fetal position, and folded her hands on her wound, digging the thin fingers in and brushing bone as well as jagged glass. There was a grunt, a muttered complaint at the increase in pain as her fingers pried and pulled and bloodied further. Finally, the shard of glass that bit her so harshly clattered to the ground at her side with a rewarding tinkle._

_"You aren't done yet, dear one," his voice chewed into her ears, biting deeper than the blade of glass, and she recalled her purpose. She pushed herself to her feet, bracing herself against the wall, and shook back her blonde hair to stare at him. Red met blue, fire and ice, and she glared at him._

_"I am done with this," Jakarel said to Khan, her words achingly brittle compared to his. She tasted iron like bile on her tongue. His gaze, so eerily passive, masked the anger boiling beneath the surface. The calmness contrasted her savage expression, her unabashed anger._

_Her pain._

_"No," he said. He moved forward, she moved to the side. He smirked, she hardened her glare._

_"Stop it, Khan," she said when he moved again. It was like a dance and she did not want to continue the motions. Her sidestep came a moment too late and he took advantage with another step forward. He was within arm's reach now._

_"Yield," he said to her. His voice was even, yet he leaned forward with anticipation of her refusal._

_She bit her tongue and retreated. The corner of the room was approaching. The door was so near. If she made it, would her brothers and sisters rise to shield her?_

_"Stop it," she muttered as he moved forward again._

_He reached for her and her heart leapt in her chest, touched her tongue, and she gave in._

_His fingers closed around her neck, so soft and cold and unkind, and she closed her eyes._

_Death came with a breath of a kiss, a murmur of love, and a breaking of her fragile bones under his augmented strength._

Her eyes were open, unfocused as they gazed at the horrible light focused directly on her face. She felt the faint stirrings of amusement that, for a society so far advanced, they still treated their prisoners with the horrible intention of causing as much pain as possible.

The sting of a needle didn't bring a rise from her. She couldn't even bother to swat at the hand that depressed the plunger, injecting her with whatever foul concoctions had been dreamt up. Almost immediately she felt the burning sting of the toxin, flaying at her nerves. She wanted to tear her own skin off her body, spread it wide so the air might cool the burn.

Belatedly, she remembered that it was her own toxin being tested on her and that those hands filling her with the poison were the elegant hands of Khan himself.

She focused slightly as the poison brought itself to her chest, burnt itself into her heart, and she gasped finally with the pain. It felt like it was eating her alive, consuming her body voraciously, and spreading all the more rapidly now that it had embraced her heart. She felt his eyes on her, focused with his cold intensity and sharp attention, and she forced herself back into silence. She chewed at her tongue and succumbed again to the sharp invitation of her hallucinations.

She wouldn't have seen the concern in his pale eyes, or the anger. The sorrow would have wounded her in particular.

_"You should have let me sleep," his purr was soft, dark, seductive. It brushed over her with the caress of a lover and brought colour to her face even as she leaned forward to press a kiss to his mouth._

_"Never," she said with a smile against his mouth, the hint of a bite beneath her words. His eyes glimmered with the emotions of a man beguiled by the named woman astride him and as she sought to sit back up, his hands seized upon her waist and brought her to him._

_They didn't speak for a long time after that._

_Afterwards, as she lay beside him in the cryotube that would one day belong to her, she contented herself with exploring his body beneath his shirt, stroking the expanse of bare chest not seen, and he enjoyed himself with idly tracing patters on the forearm across his chest cradling her head._

_"You know that this isn't real, right?" He asked her. He sounded much kinder than he usually did._

_She felt fire in her veins._

_"It's as real as I wish it to be," she responded. Her eyes glinted a warning. His glimmered amusement._

_"We will never be like this, you know," he sounded uncharacteristically conversational, at ease. She flinched and closed her eyes, longing for the ecstasy and comfort she had experienced with him earlier._

_"Stop it, Khan," she said quietly. He toyed with her hair idly. The promise of pain lingered beneath his tender touch._

_"I'll kill you in the end," he murmured._

_She sighed._

_"I will die for you."_

* * *

His gaze was decidedly impassive as he observed the experiments taking their toll on the augment before him, his expression neutral even as he inwardly raged. This was one of _his _people being treated as nothing more than a lab animal. This woman was _his _and he was helping them torture her.

His hands clenched into fists when she parted her lips in a gasp, a mutter of complaint that she soon silenced once she felt his grasp upon her shoulder.

He was disgusted, horribly disgusted, by the cruelty these people who considered themselves so _superior_ would express to someone who had given up most of her desires in order to save them.

His anger boiled beneath the surface, a volcanic eruption dying to escape and obliterate the people present.

"Cardiac arrest successful," the cool voice of a doctor brought him to attention immediately. He raised his eyes from her body, letting his hand continue to rest on her shoulder, to stare at the monitors that recorded the functioning of Jakarel's organs. He could see it. Her heart faltered, beat, and shuddered.

He wanted to strangle them all as he watched them administer the antidote to the toxin, restoring the life to the faltering organs. He wasn't a stupid man, after all. He knew what they were doing, even if they didn't know yet themselves. Their interest in toxins with the potency to kill an augment was very much clearly implied with every development that Jakarel pushed out for them. The testing phase, though, showed the villainy beneath their calm outer shell much easier, though. They were not happy with the idea of using the poisons on their own criminals. No, they would only accept an Augment, a willing test subject, and both Jakarel and Khan were loathe to volunteer another member of their family. He himself didn't volunteer because, as Jakarel ended up telling him in private, he was more important than her.

Nobody actually complained when she came and said she would serve as a guinea pig. Khan's wrath remained tempered with the humans allowing him to oversee the tests.

His vision wavered with anger as Jakarel groaned, a very visual shift in the way she held her face signifying the alleviating pain.

"Sort of like old times, isn't it?" One of the doctors, some nameless man with a mask over his face as though he was afraid to contract a disease, leaned over Khan's shoulder. "Maybe you were meant to be a lab rat."

Jakarel tensed on the bed, taking insult to his words, and Khan mirrored her reaction. He glared at the other male, his eyes silently spelling out a dire threat, and the human quickly backed off.

"I want to go home, Khan," Jakarel murmured as Khan watched the human retreat, considering the ways to kill the frail human. He turned his head to look down at Jakarel, the one that would have been his wife had they followed the human customs much closer than they did. Something stirred in his eyes, although it wasn't the usual cold emotions of anger or hate. It was something like sorrow instead, much more profound than it would have been in the eyes of a lesser being.

"Soon," he said to her. She nodded once and closed her eyes, succumbing to a much needed rest. The doctors that had recorded the whole thing scurried to life, checking monitors and taking notes, and while they bored him he did not leave the side of his sister.

* * *

**_The Botany didn't actually look like much, but from what Jakarel had heard of her, she was actually a capable ship and had seen more than enough travels to and from Mars. She stated her impression of the ship to the others and earned amused laughter tinged with unease. The thought of spaceflight appealed to them as much as it did to her, it seemed._**

**_"Is the cargo loaded?" Khan's words were bitten out with the undertones of stress and irritation._**

**_"Yes, Khan," Jakobi rumbled from the depths of the metal beast. He emerged, dressed in the finest rags their assumed poverty could muster. The clothing went unmentioned. It was no worse than the 'monkey suits' their creators had them wearing all the time. "We are ready to go when you are."_**

**_Jakarel watched Khan emerge from the faces of the rest of their number working on outfitting the machine, the alien eyes burning into hers and the eyes of the rest of them. There were so few left now that it didn't take long for his glare to have met with the gazes of his people. There was a hesitation, a breath of a question, before the Augments knelt before their leader with the reverence of believers meeting their god at long last. Jakarel was one of them and she felt the uncomfortable nagging sensation of something being not right in her heart before she closed her eyes._**

**_"We depart tonight. Begin the preparations." Khan's voice was sharp, cold, and yet held an indescribable warmth as though he found something grand and kind in their submission to him._**

**_The Augments rose, not nearly as fluidly as they had knelt, and in silence went about their way preparing for the end. They would burn the facility, erase the signs of their habitation, and their existence on earth would cease once they boarded that ship and departed for an uncertain future._**

* * *

"I believe I've done more than enough to prove that I deserve to see this son of a bitch for myself," Kirk's voice was unnaturally low, guttural. A growl rather than the usual sharp tone of command. His blue eyes were crystal clear and intensely focused on the Admiral who sat before him, her slender hands folded over her lap as she considered him with the intense scrutiny he had come to miss from his mentor, Christopher Pike.

"I am loathe to allow you a pass for a visitation, Kirk, let alone for a reason like _that._ Curiousity is hardly a Starfleet protocol," she said. She sounded much older than she looked. "I am told that the Augments are an unstable bunch, even now, and the slightest provocation could shatter what has been built up for them. You would not be doing us any favours by being there, Kirk, especially not while Khan is aware."

He stiffened at her words, prepared for another argument.

"However," she cut him off sharply, her dark eyes alight with amusement. "I do believe just one day on site should suffice to calm you mind, don't you?"

His mouth dropped, his arguments forgotten. Had she really just said yes? She, who had put him through a week of disciplinary action for his disobedience, for abandoning his mission over a gut feeling that all was not well with the Augments? This couldn't be happening.

"It's for you alone, though, Kirk. We can't have everybody knowing there are Augments straight from the history books kept offshore of one of the nation's greater cities."

Kirk nodded, biting his tongue to keep from spilling his tirade of questions. He would have the opportunity later, once he was assured he wouldn't be ruining this wonderful opportunity. He almost smirked his victory but carefully maintained his neutral expression. Something like amusement glimmered in the Admiral's eyes as she watched him.

"You are dismissed," she said eventually.

"Thank you, ma'am," he nodded.

* * *

Waking up was incredibly hard, incredibly painful, and she longed to not have to do it. However, her stubbornness won out in the end and had her sitting up ramrod straight before it had her opening wide her dark red eyes. She flinched and hissed before breaking down into a powerful coughing fit.

"Good. You are awake." The voice was cold, detached, and spoke of threat. She raised her eyes, her body still shaking with the force of her coughing, to find Khan perched on a chair a few feet from the stiff bed the humans had her recovering upon.

Even during her coughing, Jakarel inclined her head to him in defference, blinking aside her gaze before she lost herself to the powerful jolts again. Khan sighed, the sound very different than his usual ones, and she looked up at him quickly.

He stood and turned, staring out the window that opened to the hall. Both halves of the corridor appeared empty, yet nonetheless he began to rap his fingertips carefully along the wall. His message was spelled out audibly, for everyone who knew what to listen to rather than her alone.

_Soon_, the message said. _Soon, we will be free. Wait for signal. No one left behind._

When he had finished, he crossed the room to join her on the bed. He climbed on and she made him space, curling her body against his as though he could shield her from further cruelty. She continued to cough and find trouble breathing during the long night, but he would be awake with her to comfort her during the painful spells.

And she was glad, finally.


End file.
